Denuvo-protected games are toppling like dominoes these days. Mass Effect Andromeda has become the latest to fall, raising serious question marks over whether the implementation of the anti-tamper DRM has any worth in the first place.

Mass Effect Andromeda took just 13 days to crack. That’s longer than the five days it took Resident Evil 7, but that’s still a mighty worrying scenario for BioWare and EA to be in. Generally publishers are going to be looking for at least a month’s anti-piracy protection minimum in order to protect sales during the initial launch period. Mass Effect 4 launched less than two weeks ago.

A great amount of finger pointing goes on at Denuvo for affecting performance of games, although it was difficult to ascertain if there were any performance issues with Mass Effect Andromeda. It ran pretty well in the benchmarks we put it through, making it a difficult case to argue that Denuvo affects the legitimate Mass Effect Andromeda player in any conceivable way. The only real issue is if the Denuvo servers go down, however this is an extremely rare occurrence.

Denuvo has plenty of detractors on PC, and within reason, but I can’t help but feel this swift cracking of games is going to come back and bite the PC audience shortly. Launching a game on PC simultaneously with consoles now seems like a fool’s errand, and there’s more to be gained by holding PC versions back, or indeed potentially not releasing them at all. I’m sure the publishers have the data on this and have been busy crunching the numbers. I'd love to be wrong but it's a far more realistic proposition than the likes of EA and Ubisoft saying 'screw this, we're going DRM-free, the audience has spoken'.

As for where this leaves EA and BioWare, an update may be on the cards. Once a game is cracked there seems little use in keeping it tied into Denuvo. Hopefully BioWare will patch it out in a similar manner to id Software and DOOM late last year.