Denuvo is one of the most well-known and most hated DRM technologies on the market. Many gamers intensely dislike it, both as a matter of principle and because of its reputation for negatively impacting game performance.

Last week, Digital Foundry confirmed that a cracked version of "Resident Evil 7: Resident Evil Village" runs more comfortably than the DRMed release version. Since the game also uses Capcom's proprietary DRM technology, this finding is hardly conclusive evidence, and the patch released today to address the issue states only that "adjustments have been made to optimize the anti-piracy technology."

Today, Amplitude Studios, the developer of Humankind, announced that it will be making its own, more serious Denuvo-related adjustments: the anti-tampering technology will be completely removed from the game before launch. [Romain de Waubert de Genlis, head of Amplitude Studios, wrote on the Humankind forum. "We are one of the most wishlisted games on Steam this year and we know that we will be targeted by pirates more than any other game so far. If Denuvo can stop the cracked versions for even a few days, it will really help us protect our launch already."

"Having said that, our priority is to always provide the best experience for the players who buy our games and support us, and Denuvo should never affect player performance, and we don't want to sacrifice quality for you Denuvo should never affect the performance of our players and we don't want to sacrifice quality for your sake.

This decision was made after a recent closed beta revealed that the current implementation of Denuvo was "not good enough," de Vaubert de Genlis said. The project was cancelled because it would not be ready for release even if the problems were corrected.

Reaction to the announcement has been quite positive, although some people on the Steam forums have said they will not start celebrating until the Denuvo listing is removed from Steam's page. However, these respondents represent only a small fraction of Humankind's supposed total user base: will the absence of Denuvo result in a higher rate of piracy, or will it ultimately have little to do with it? We hope that at some point after launch, Amplitude will unveil some insight into the situation. [The game is a 4X strategy game that looks a lot like "Civilization 6," but takes a completely different approach. It's distinguished from Civilization in a well-thought-out way, and there's nothing that looks like it was added just for the sake of novelty." Like Civilization, Humankind is moddable, including the AI, so ambitious players can change what they don't like. Launch is August 17.