A couple of weeks ago, Playdead removed Denuvo’s anti-piracy tech from the Steam version of Inside. They did so in typical Playdead fashion, which is to say without using words to explain any of it. Now id Software’s done the same with DOOM. Sadly, they didn’t make the announcement with heavy metal.
As part of a new patch that adds multiplayer bots and a new demon eyeball sport mode, id appears to have removed Denuvo from the game. As for why, nobody’s sure. Like Playdead (and Doom guy, I guess, if we’re going for game analogues again), id seems content to say nothing at all.
There are theories floating around, though. The biggest is a rumour that Denuvo offers developers a money back guarantee if a game is cracked within three months. The (alleged) main stipulation? Developers have to remove the anti-piracy tech first. Given that Inside and Doom have both been cracked, majorly blemishing Denuvo’s vaunted uncrackable reputation, that would certainly explain the removal.
Again, though, for now these are only rumours. I’ve reached out to Denuvo as well as a handful of developers who use Denuvo in their games, but I’ve yet to hear anything substantial from any of them. If developers keep removing Denuvo from their games, though, I doubt it will be too much longer before we hear more.
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5 responses to “DOOM Becomes Latest Game To Drop Anti-Piracy Tech Denuvo”
Does Denuvo have any negative impact on performance or hardware/software conflicts the way that earlier DRM like Starforce, SecuROM and others did?
I’ve heard the bigger publishers are mostly only worried about their launch week sales, considering everything else in the tail to be icing on the cake, so it wouldn’t be too surprising if DRM were quietly removed from many AAA titles the year after they come out to reduce on-going DRM costs (eg: server authentication etc) and aid preservation efforts or avoid cross-platform/distributor portability/conflicts.
There were some erroneous early claims that it caused way more disk activity that could potentially shorten the lifespans of SSDs but these claims had no real merit. You’re right about it only being used to protect day one sales so again I feel no need to pat Bethesda on the proverbial back for this one.
There have been many rumours about Denuvo’s performance impacts. Would be interesting to know if anyone has looked at their FPS before and after this patch without changing any settings to give a definitive answer.
On my 4790k, gtx780, 16gb and win10. No real difference.
Denuvo has a money back guarantee, if a game with it gets cracked within a certain timeframe Denuvo will refund the money publishers spend on the title but the publisher must remove the denuvo drm from their game.
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