Borderlands 4 Silently Ditches Denuvo DRM With Reports Citing Notable FPS

Denuvo DRM software has always been controversial at best, and it has recently become fairly common practice to remove it from games following their launch, as was the case with 007 First Light, whose developer removed Denuvo from the game a mere two months post-launch. In the case of Borderlands 4, rumors started circulating that Denuvo has been removed from the game as of an October 22, 2026, update. This change has not yet been confirmed by 2K Games or Gearbox Software, however.

Reports of Denuvo disappearing from Borderlands 4 started with Borderlands creators @EpicNNG, who was previously responsible for the Borderlands Online revival and @lewisØn, and were later seemingly confirmed by @ExploredFiction, who inspected the contents of the Borderlands 4 game files. SteamDB itself doesn't directly note the removal of Denuvo, but the game's binaries are 171.69 MB smaller in the latest update, and several packages have been removed from the game files. While there is no hard benchmarking data to prove it, there are currently reports that the game runs faster without Denuvo running in the background. Read full story