Copy protection locked some players out of the CrossWorlds Steam free weekend

On 1 May 2026, during the Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds free weekend on Steam, some players could not launch the racer. Startup brought up a window pointing at support for Codefusion, the company that runs Denuvo.

Reports said the protection asked for proof of a purchased copy and would not accept the temporary free license. The failure was not universal: others wrote that the race opened without that error. Memory came up in the same discussion: 8 gigabytes was cited as the comfortable floor, and machines with about 6 gigabytes available were crashing apart from the license check.

Sega later answered the complaints. Players began confirming that a server-side correction had gone out and that the trial access worked after it.