Now here is a pleasant surprise. Deep Silver has just removed the Denuvo anti-tamper tech from Dead Island 2. Dead Island 2 came out in April 2023. This means that it took Deep Silver over two years to remove Denuvo from it.
Dead Island 2 is one of the few games that had amazing pre-baked lighting. As such, the game performed incredibly well on PC. Not only that, but it looked amazing. In fact, it was one of the games we featured in our Top 10 Best PC Graphics of 2023 list.
The game did not suffer from any mouse issues, it has proper on-screen K&M indicators, and I did not experience any crashes. For those wondering, yes. It does have some traversal stutters, though they weren’t that frequent.
Strangely enough, the game did not get official support for NVIDIA DLSS. It did support AMD FSR, but we all know that DLSS is better than FSR. Thankfully, though, there is a mod that replaces FSR with DLSS. This is also a free mod, something that will please a lot of you. So, make sure to get it from here.
From what I know, Dead Island 2 was a commercial hit. The game sold one million copies in its first three days. Then, in May 2023, Deep Silver revealed that it had sold over 2 million copies. Deep Silver and Dambuster Studios have also announced that they are now working on the next Dead Island game. So, I’m really looking forward to it.
As we’ve reported, other companies have also removed Denuvo from several of their titles. In March 2023, KRAFTON removed Denuvo from The Callisto Protocol. NEOWIZ has also removed it from its Souls-like game, Lies of P. In October 2024, Gearbox removed it from Homeworld 3, too.
Square Enix is another publisher that has removed Denuvo from a lot of its titles. For instance, the publisher has removed it from games like The Diofield Chronicle, VALKYRIE ELYSIUM, TRIANGLE STRATEGY, LIVE A LIVE, and Forspoken. Moreover, both Octopath Traveler and its sequel no longer use it. And, in May 2024, SE removed it from Star Ocean The Second Story R. Finally, in March 2025, the publisher removed it from Final Fantasy 16.
And that’s not all. Bethesda’s Wolfenstein Youngblood, Ghostwire: Tokyo, and Doom Eternal no longer have it. Warner Bros has also removed it from Mortal Kombat 11. Then we have Bandai Namco, which has removed it from Tekken 7 and NARUTO TO BORUTO: SHINOBI STRIKER.
Finally, we have Capcom, which has removed it from a lot of its PC titles. Capcom has removed it from numerous games. Monster Hunter Rise, Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin, and Resident Evil Village no longer have it. Similarly, Resident Evil 2 Remake and Resident Evil 3 Remake no longer use it. In July 2025, the team also removed it from Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess.
Stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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