Nowadays, most talk of DRM revolves around titles that add the “anti-tamper” tech known as Denuvo, thus preventing piracy of those games. That’s what makes the latest update to side-scrolling puzzle game Inside so unusual: The developers have chosen to do away with Denuvo.
The latest patch notes for Inside on Steam state that the game has now “removed Denuvo Anti-Tamper”. Denuvo, as many of you know, is a highly controversial device that connects a purchased game to a specific PC, making it hard for people to disseminate the title online without triggering a red flag. Thanks to Denuvo, many of the year’s biggest games cannot be pirated.
Playdead did not give a reason for the removal of Denuvo in the short patch-notes, though it’s worth noting that the game was also recently released on GOG — which is marketed as a digital storefront that does not believe in DRM. That might be a clue. We reached out to Playdead to ask about the particulars of the situation, but had not heard back at time of writing.
For now, it seems that fans are cheering the move:
Comments
6 responses to “In A Twist, Game Update Drops Denuvo Anti-Piracy Tech On Steam”
The DRM was to protect against day zero piracy, that’s done its dash and now its being removed after the period where the overwhelming majority of full price sales have already been made. Also not the first time DRM has been relaxed or removed from a game after its honeymoon period either.
It’s nice that the devs have done it but I think the props and thanks for this very calculated act are undeserved.
Wasn’t there a whole thing about how Denuvo was reducing the performance of games it was put into?
Not only reduce performance, cause incompatibilities with few hardware configurations, cause game bugs, crashes and sometimes make the game just quit. It also prevents modding, or a simple add on like X360CE which just makes any controller work as it makes the see the controller as XBox 360 controller because that is the only controller the game supports.
IT has been causing less problems now but it wouldn’t be a major surprise that the unoptimised PC game releases is because of Denuvo since Denuvo is applied at release without testing.
Hasn’t had that effect or stopped mods on doom4
Isn’t Denuvo being cracked a lot these days anyway? I’ve seen a lot of lists touted around of “uncrackable” AAA games that have been cracked.
Cracked cracked crackle snap pop
Yeah there are a fair amount of Denuvo protected games that have been cracked, but usually it’s weeks or even months before a crack comes out if at all. From what I understand it’s not easy at all though and has actually caused some crackers to quit in frustration.