What is Denuvo?

Denuvo simply put is a form if Digital Rights Management (DRM). Its intended purpose is to prevent piracy. It was developed by Denuvo Software Solutions. It also prevents tampering (debugging, reverse engineering) and cheating. It's proprietary software and the actual specifics of how it works have not been released.

It can be cracked in the sense that the protections are bypassed and not removed. Resident Evil 7 was cracked within five days of release, Tekken 7 was cracked 4 days after release, while some games such as Star Wars Battlefront have not been cracked.

There are many reasons why people hate on Denuvo.

1. Performance: Denuvo impacts performance of the game you're playing. It makes it worse.

2. Limits your OS: It only supports Windows, so you can't use Linux or OS X.

3. Activation/Reactivation: If you haven't played the game in a while or changed your hardware/system configuration, you'll need to reactivate.
4. You need an internet connection.
5. If the service shuts down, you're not able to play your game.

There's a bunch of other reasons, but I've hit on the main ones. You can read more here: https://whyisdenuvobad.github.io/

We can't tell exactly what Denuvo does. Some rumors said that Denuvo is read/writing, crypting/decrypting continually on the drive, causing a loss of performance or even shortened SSD's life. But Denuvo keep saying it's a wrong rumor.

Edit : it has been confirmed that it was a myth. Denuvo do not cause damage to SSD. Here's the source : https://web.archive.org/web/20150119041502/http://asidcast.com/index.php/2014/11/new-drm-denuvo-might-damaging-ssd

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/2mtxub/denuvo_drm_does_not_destroy_or_damage_ssds_proof/

Chinese hackers 3DM say that Denuvo is using a 64-Bits key specific to each computer's hardware.

But obviously, Denuvo never told how their system works.

People are pissed of Denuvo because :

1. it can slow your game (cracked version are faster sometimes, quite ironic). But it's not true for all games. For some, the gap is insignificant. For others, you'll lose ~10% of your FPS (Mass Effect Andromeda and Mad Max for the example).
2. you need an internet connexion
3. Activation (and mostly reactivation) problems but I'm not sure

Recently, some games have been cracked the day of their release. And sometime Denuvo is just removed from the game by publisher. Hackers was saying that they'll won't be able to crack games anymore a few years ago because of Denuvo. Now it seems Denuvo lost the war :)

The most commonly used argument is that the games using Denuvo will cease functioning if the Denuvo activation servers are shut down (there appears to be no fixed authentication span, but Denuvo verifies ownership at least on the first launch and after hardware upgrades). There are two major DRM schemes, SafeDisc and StarForce (some versions of), which aren't compatible with modern Windows operating systems.