Ghostwire: Tokyo Removes Controversial Feature

The Steam version of Ghostwire: Tokyo has removed Denuvo Anti-Tamper. The change rolled out as part of a recent update that spelled the end of Ghostwire: Tokyo's unusual approach to the controversial digital rights management (DRM) tool.

Developed by ZeniMax subsidiary Tango Gameworks, Ghostwire: Tokyo debuted to decent reviews in March 2022. The PC version of the game launched with nothing major in the way of anti-piracy and -tampering protections beyond Steam's native DRM. Instead, Tango Gameworks only added Denuvo to Ghostwire: Tokyo more than a year later, just as its supernatural action adventure reached the Xbox Series X/S and Xbox Game Pass in April 2023.

The developer has now reversed course yet again, having removed the controversial feature in a recent update. The patch, first spotted by Reddit user lurkingdanger22, rolled out on April 17, one year and five days after Ghostwire: Tokyo originally added Denuvo. Much like the 2023 update, this newest patch arrived without any fanfare. Even so, a few of the game's latest Steam user reviews are already citing the removal of Denuvo as the main motivation behind their recommendation.

This turn of events spells an end to Ghostwire: Tokyo's strange handling of Denuvo, which has been puzzling some fans for the past year. While the controversial anti-tampering solution has long been seeing widespread use across the industry, it has been almost exclusively implemented into games from day one. That's largely because publishers' main motivation for using Denuvo in the first place is to curb piracy, which makes the most sense to do before any given title gets cracked.

In contrast, pirates already had a field day with Ghostwire: Tokyo long before its PC version received Denuvo 13 months following its initial debut. The move proved to be controversial among the fandom, not least because it quadrupled the game's executable size and led to some allegations of Denuvo-related frame rate drops. The latter were never proven