According to users on ResetEra and Steam, Dragonball FighterZ’s Denuvo encryption has been bypassed, and pirated copies are reportedly able to join online lobbies and play with legitimate players. Users are reporting encountering pirated players online or know pirates that have played matches with veteran accounts.
Despite some of these claims having been already debunked, there’s a suggestion that pirated copies are also using the PayDay 2 Demo ID to legitimize a copy with Steam. The PayDay 2 Demo has seen a rise in player count over the past couple of days with player count jumping from the mid 700’s to well over 2000 according to Steam Charts.
Denuvo DRM (digital rights management) has been a controversial topic in the PC community for the past few years now. While preventing games piracy is absolutely within the right of every publisher, many players and developers have claimed that Denuvo has caused performance issues with games that implement it. This has been especially true with fighting games, as Tekken director Katsuhiro Harada tweeted out recently that Denuvo is the cause for substantial frame drops in the PC version of Tekken 7.
It’s no surprise, then, that when it was revealed that one of the most popular fighting games this year, Dragonball FighterZ, would be using Denuvo, the community didn’t respond kindly. Outspoken fans called for the game to be cracked so that Denuvo could be removed entirely, thus preventing any performance issues.
There has been no word yet from Bandai Namco on how it will resolve the breach or what action the company might yet take.