Does Dead Island 2 have Denuvo? – Answered

It’s been more than 10 years since the release of the first game, making the April 21 launch of Dead Island 2 one project that’s been long in the making. Longtime fans can finally gear up to play the sequel, but there are many burning questions given how different it is from the original game. One such question is if Dead Island 2 has Denuvo DRM software, and it does indeed have it according to a recently published article from DSOGaming.

For those who need a reminder, Denuvo is an anti-piracy software known as DRM (digital rights management) which developers implement into games. It’s understandable why developers do this to protect their business models, but anti-piracy software like Denuvo is known as a frequent cause for performance issues in games. This can result in stutters, low fps from higher hardware utilization, crashes, and plenty of other irritating things for customers who paid for the game.

Dead Island 2 does have Denuvo, and some hefty PC spec requirements

According to DSOGaming, they performed multiple performance tests in which they repeatedly modified the system hardware configuration on the BIOS level. The specific practice performed involved manually disabling CPU cores. This is a crude method some reviewers use to ballpark performance across a range of CPUs. The 16-core Ryzen 5950X was modified five different times which triggered Denuvo to lock the user out from running Dead Island 2.

From what we understand, Denuvo logged the hardware changes and incorrectly concluded that copy of Dead Island 2 was in use on five different PCs. This triggered a prompt which explained to the user that Denuvo restricted access to the game.

Image via DSOGaming

As already explained, Denuvo can cause a number of performance issues. This may explain in part why the requirements to play Dead Island 2 on PC are so demanding. A few things to note are the high RAM capacity requirement, the CPU requirements, and that you’ll need a fairly powerful GPU, especially if using AMD Radeon graphics.

On the upside, we know before launch that Dead Island 2 does have Denuvo so you don’t have to encounter any frustrating surprising after buying the game. Developers sometimes do make post-launch optimizations specifically to address issues caused by anti-piracy software though, so we’ll see how this one plays out.