Update: Fifteen hours after the first major patch for Gotham Knights removed Denuvo from the executable, it was added in a small follow-up patch. What many players celebrated as a positive move was apparently an accident.

On Wednesday, the Gotham Knights patch reduced the file size of its executable by 327.10 megabytes, as captured by SteamDB, and players on Reddit noted that Denuvo was gone. This size is in line with Denuvo's anti-piracy DRM, which often adds hundreds of megabytes to a game's .exe. Half a day later, another update added 315.6 megabytes to the exe. While not the same amount, this too is in line with Denuvo's usual .exe bloat; Denuvo is still listed on Gotham Knights' Steam page.

As Redditors have pointed out, this change is probably too little, too late. one poster on the r/PiratedGames subreddit wrote, "It's in deep water now. We have reached out to Warner Bros. for comment on Gotham Knights' use of Denuvo.

The original story is below.

Gotham Knights, well, it kind of rang a bell. A spin-off of the Arkham series, in which you play as Batman's four sidekicks in the aftermath of the Dark Knight's apparent demise, it's generally lackluster, and it's certainly not helped by ongoing performance problems on the PC.

The first patch for the game has arrived, but it does not address these, but makes a number of tweaks, and for reasons unknown, it removes Denuvo, the anti-piracy technology beloved by gamers worldwide. This seems odd, but it has been seen before in other titles, where Denuvo (or its equivalent) is activated and removed after the initial sales period.

Other fixes include graphical glitches, control issues, and, surprisingly, "invincible enemies playing the 'meditation' animation no longer appear in the crime." In short, I would have liked to have seen it: could have improved the experience.

The full patch notes are as follows:

Regarding performance issues, the official account simply states that "the team is working hard on a larger patch to improve overall performance and provide the best experience possible."

There is more to come for Gotham Knights, and the big hope is that four-player co-op will eventually be introduced. Whether it can save this version of Gotham is a cliffhanger, and the answer to that question can already be predicted.