Humankind removed Denuvo DRM from the game, three weeks ahead of the game’s launch on August 17, 2021.

Humankind‘s closed beta testing put developers Amplitude Studios in a bind. It turns out that the game’s Denuvo DRM system, which makes it hard for pirates to illegally make copies and cracks of the game, makes it so that Humankind becomes unplayable at some moments. They had to choose between two equally undesirable outcomes. The first Humankind gets bad reviews at launch because of the game’s instability due to Denuvo. Either that or risk Humankind getting pirated weeks ahead of its launch.

Amplitude Studios chose the latter option. They’d rather the game get pirated and distributed for free. At least the version of Humankind that will be bought legally from stores will be playable, no problem.

“We’ve been working on [Humankind] for more than 4 years now and personally it’s been my dream project for 25 years. We’ve been one of the most wishlisted games on Steam this year, so we know we’re going to be targeted by pirates, more so than any of our previous games. If Denuvo can hold off a cracked version, even just for a few days, that can already really help us to protect our launch,” says Romain, CCO and Studio Head at Amplitude. “That being said, our priority is always the best possible experience for the players who buy our games and support us. Denuvo should never impact player performance, and we don’t want to sacrifice [Humankind]’s quality for you guys.”

Denuvo also received some bad raps recently when it was found out that it caused Resident Evil Village to slow down. Hopefully, removing Denuvo from Humankind won’t affect its sales much and fix its performance issues as intended.