The latest Ghostwire: Tokyo update introduced Denuvo to the PC version of the game, having done so for no apparent reason. This contentious anti-tampering feature arrived just as Ghostwire: Tokyo debuted on Xbox Game Pass.
Generally speaking, Denuvo is a highly controversial topic among the PC gaming crowd. While it's often used as an anti-piracy measure, it's also a popular choice among multiplayer games because its code obfuscation functionality inhibits reverse engineering that's a prerequisite for creating cheats. From a consumer's perspective, the core issue is that all of this often comes at the expense of worse performance.
According to version control data scraped by SteamDB, the latest Ghostwire: Tokyo update introduced Denuvo to Tango Gameworks' supernatural action adventure. Subsequent player reports suggest the game's executable file has consequently quadrupled in size, gaining over 263 MB as a result of this addition. It is currently unclear whether Tango Gameworks also added Denuvo to the Epic Games Store and Microsoft Store versions of Ghostwire: Tokyo. Though that's likely to be the case, neither of those storefronts provides a public API that would allow for scraping patch history data like Steam does.
While Denuvo's anti-piracy measures have repeatedly proven not to be impenetrable, its overall addition to Ghostwire: Tokyo is still highly unusual. Not least because it arrives more than a year following the game's PC release, which has long been cracked. Between that and the fact that this is a single-player experience, it is unclear what prompted Tango Gameworks or Bethesda's decision to invest both time and money into implementing Denuvo, as Ghostwire: Tokyo seemingly doesn't stand to gain anything from this addition.
One explanation could be that Ghostwire: Tokyo is planned to receive multiplayer features in the future, but such a turn of events would be highly unusual. Not just because the game's been out for a while now with no indication of such a huge update being on the horizon, but also due to the fact that Tango Gameworks doesn't really do multiplayer. The only such title that the Japanese studio released in its 13-year history was Hero Dice, which is a mobile-only game that hasn't even reached the West since its 2022 debut.
It remains to be seen whether this move will impact Ghostwire: Tokyo's PC performance, though Austria-based Denuvo Software Solutions has often downplayed reports of its anti-tampering tech's resource-intensiveness. The company's parent, Irdeto, also posits that a proper Denuvo implementation can have a negligible performance impact, so long as developers take the time to meticulously intertwine their game code with the anti-tampering software. Taking that claim at face value, the sheer number of high-profile cases of Denuvo being clearly detrimental to the gameplay experience suggests that many studios aren't doing so.
Ghostwire: Tokyo is available now for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Source: Irdeto