For a brief moment in time, it almost appeared as though Warner Bros. did the PC gaming community a solid when they removed Denuvo anti-tamper from Gotham Knights. The controversial DRM has long been thorn in the sides of those looking to play games on PC. It aims to prevent, or at least slow the availability of, cracked versions of new releases, but it has often been found to be the source of performance and stability woes for legitimate customers.
When Warner Bros. updated Gotham Knights on PC roughly 21 hours ago (from the time of this posting), a lot of people seemed to rejoice as Denuvo was quietly removed. The game seemed to have already been cracked anyway, so why keep this added DRM measure in and potentially degrade performance for legitimate, paying customers?
Sadly, it seems as though the removal of Denuvo from Gotham Knights was done in error. About 14 hours after it was accidentally removed from the PC release, Warner Bros. added it right back in. This means that even if the game weren't already cracked, there was a span of time where pirates could have downloaded a Denuvo-free version of the game.
Really, the only thing adding Denuvo back into the game does is punish paying customers. On the flip side, because Denuvo is in the game, this will make it more difficult for pirates to implement future content updates and official fixes.
Warner Bros. did not mention anything about this little flub when they took to Twitter to talk about the current status of the game. They at least touched upon the severe performance woes impacting the game across all platforms. The company notes that the devs are working hard to release a larger update for all platforms to address performance woes. In particular, a future update for console owners will try to tackle an issue of framerate stability.
