Elmofongo: So please answer to me with absolute clarity as a laymen, why is Denuvo bad?
I don't know (nor care) what others have already said, but my understanding, which may be incorrect, is that Denuvo is not the actual DRM
per se ("perse", by the way, is "arse" in Finnish, just so that you know. So like "My arse is itching." =" "
Persettäni kutittaa.").
My understanding is that the main point of Denuvo (from now on, "perse") is to protect the actual DRM within, make it harder to remove or crack the actual DRM. So in the case of the Shenmue games, it might be the actual DRM is e.g. Steam CEG, but there is Perse on top of it to make it harder to crack it.
I have no idea of the performance losses, but naturally it is bad for the archiving purposes if Perse was so successful that a simple DRM would become uncrackable, and also AFAIK Perse also makes rest of the game "unmoddable", besides the modding tools the developer is offering. So just like the DRM becomes uncrackable(?), the rest of the game code also becomes "unaltererable". Think of e.g. all the modificiations people have made for games like Morrowind, Oblivion, Doom etc.
On the other hand, apparently Perse isn't luckily quite uncrackable after all even though that one Chinese cracking group already claimed so at one point, and also luckily many publishers seem to throw it away after some time, for reasons unknown.