Crimson Desert Reveals It Will Use Controversial DRM Just A Week Before Launch (Update)

Upcoming open-world RPG Crimson Desert has a lot of hype surrounding it, with many worried it might look too good to be true. But just a week ahead of the game’s March 19 release, players learned that Crimson Desert will launch with Denuvo DRM on PC. And people aren’t happy about it.

On March 12, as spotted by The Gamer and users on Reddit, Crimson Desert’s official Steam store page was quietly updated and now includes this small alert about DRM:

“Incorporates 3rd-party DRM: Denuvo Anti-tamper. 5 different PC within a day machine activation limit”

As confirmed by SteamDB, this text was added to the store page on Thursday. Denuvo DRM, while it has certainly improved over the years, is not a fan favorite among PC players. The DRM is designed to stop people from cracking the game and spreading it online via pirate sites. And it mostly works at accomplishing that task. However, Denuvo has caused performance issues in many games over the years, something the company has admitted in the past. So players weren’t pleased to learn, just a week before launch, that Crimson Desert would include Denuvo DRM.

“Really scummy move adding denuvo this last moment,” said one user in a comment under an unrelated Crimson Desert Steam post.

“Devuvo last week before launch. Glad I waited before buying. Saved me money,” said another player in the same thread.

“Welp, off the wishlist it comes, then. I’m not going to be forced to ask permission to play something that I pay for,” said one Reddit user.

Even if Denuvo didn’t cause performance issues in some games, revealing your game will use DRM this close to launch after taking pre-orders seems like a crappy thing to do. There are legitimate reasons for people to want to avoid DRM and totally valid reasons for why publishers implement software like Denuvo. But hiding DRM from customers until the last minute is crummy all around.

Update: 3/12/26, 5:30 p.m. ET: Pearl Abyss sent over this statement to Kotaku about Denuvo in Crimson Desert:

“The benchmark videos and performance specs we released were all created with the exact same implementation of Denuvo that is in the launch build. This includes the performance videos by Digital Foundry. It’s important that reviewers and benchmarkers’ experience with the game is ultimately representative of the final consumer’s experience.”