Gotham Knights Denuvo Removal Appears To Have Been Reversed

Third-person action game Gotham Knights seems to have regained its Denuvo copy protection. On Thursday it appeared to have been patched, which made the exe file 327.1MiB smaller. In the course of that day, an update increased it again by 315.6MiB.

It’s not clear why Denuvo was taken out and is now presumably back in it. Developer WB Games Montréal made no announcements about it in the patch notes or elsewhere. The news emerged from the appearance of DRM-free copies on, for example, torrent sites after the update. With this new update seems to have been reversed.

Denuvo is taken out of the games it’s in with some regularity, but this often happens some time after a crack has been released for it. In recent years, the news has repeatedly come across that games lost their Denuvo-drm. However, no crack was available for Gotham Knights at all. That, combined with the alleged rollback of the removal, makes it appear that WB Games Montréal made a mistake with the removal.

Denuvo doesn’t have a very good reputation. That’s mainly due to the performance issues that games using it can exhibit. That was highlighted in 2018 in a series of benchmarks from YouTube channel Overlord Gaming. Critics think it is unacceptable that only paying customers are affected by Denuvo.

Gotham Knights also has to deal with underperformance on both PC and consoles. From the first tests However, benchmarker CapFrameX shows that this time these cannot be attributed to Denuvo. “The game still has huge issues with frame pacing and stuttering,” the account writes, but a slightly higher average fps is clearly visible.

Gotham Knights was released on October 21 for Windows, PS5 and Xbox Series X and S. Creator WB Games Montréal previously worked on Batman: Arkham Origins and the Wii U port of Batman: Arkham City.