DOOM Eternal removed Denuvo and it plays great on Steam Deck
DOOM Eternal removed Denuvo and it plays great on Steam Deck
With all the new amazing games coming out basically every month, lets not forget some slightly older games worth playing. Like DOOM Eternal, that just removed Denuvo Anti-Tamper.
It has always played great tbf.
The always online is the only annoying part
62I will never buy a game that requires me to be always online.
34Funnily enough, you probably own plenty already, and that attitude will change as soon as there’s a game in your wheelhouse you want.
Everyone always says this, but it’s hardly every true. Too lazy too go through your comments to see if it’s true, but people say shit just for upvotes all the time. Probably the same here.
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Yeah, the implication that it didn't run before by the headline is strange. Denuvo is officially supported in Proton.
5Single player works fine offline though
3It keeps trying to connect to Bethesda servers... Slowing down the level loads
2
Agreed, but that's a big benefit on the Deck. Unless Eternal has some additional always-online requirement (and maybe it does).
1It keep always trying to connect to the Bethesda servers, unless sd is set as airplane mode. It is annoying
1
It already played great on the Deck (Denuvo hasn't been a problem for Wine/Proton for several years), but the removal of DRM is always a win in my book.
I'd like to see this trend of publishers stripping it out of their games after a couple years continue.
44I am pretty sure that when Denovo pricing leaked a while ago, we learned that keeping Denovo in a game is way more expensive the longer you keep it (yes, it's basically a subscription service for game publishers)
Denovo is really only designed for early sales, and it accomplishes that pretty well.
20Why wait a few years and not avoid it completely? I doubt there's any reliable data that confirms a significant loss in sales if they launched without Denuvo and its ilk. DRM is at best useless and at worst "harms" customers.
7You can't really measure the proportion of players that would buy the game were they not able to pirate it, which makes it easy for CEOs to imagine every incidence of piracy as a lost sale. Who's going to convince them they put the cart before the horse? It absolves them of direct responsibility for almost any shortcoming possible
4I doubt there’s any reliable data that confirms a significant loss in sales if they launched without Denuvo and its ilk.
There's no publicly available hard data one way or the other. However the fact that publishers continue to use it while abandoning other forms of DRM suggests that there is probably some benefit.
I don't really buy the argument that the only people who pirate content are people who would never pay for it to begin with. I know too many fellow software engineers that make comfy 6-figure salaries and pirate everything they can and spend money when it's the only option.
3
After the first 6 months would suffice. That's where they make the money.
3
I feel like this is just a new cash grab technique, and it’s actually pretty smart. The audience of people who will buy immediately despite DRM will do their thing, first wave of money complete. Over the next few years, trickle in more cash through steam sales. Once that well dries, get one more wave of cash by removing DRM, which appeases the audience that abstained the whole time, collecting their cash.
Edit: my half baked conspiracy theory got some attention. the argument that companies remove DRM like Denuvo because of cost makes way more sense, Occam’s razor holds true. Both can be true, they save money by removing the DRM, which has the nice side-effect of creating a small new wave of sales. Win/win. I’m sure Denuvo hates this and will one day make it more difficult for studios to just remove their software, because money.
42I heard Denovo is a subscription so eventually it's less cost effective to keep paying for it
46I heard Denovo is a subscription
This Reddit post implies that there is a one-time cost and that's it. This would make sense since Ubisoft and the likes usually do not remove it from their games.
1
Sorry but that doesn't really make sense. In that scenario it is more sensible to just release a DRM free game at start, because the first group would buy either way and the second group would buy at the higher launch/near-launch pricing (since games drop in prices over time). It doesn't make sense to make essentially 2 versions of the game over such a span of time like you described.
A more realistic scenario would be that there is some cost / licensing fee to use Denuvo tech and it no longer makes financial sense for Doom Eternal to do so, hence BOOM! DRM free.
14Pretty sure that's literally Denuvos pitch. They don't expect it to be uncracked forever, just last long enough to maximize initial sales and then eventually remove it when it's done its job. It's like a padlock on a bike, keeps honest people honest but won't actually stop a real thief.
5It stops real thieves "long enough", which is why developers and publishers continue to use it. Lots of AAA games go uncracked for a year or more. The first few months or so are the most critical time for sales.
They've come a long ways since the '00s, when DRM schemes were both far more draconian and rarely effective for more than a few days.
6
I mean, it isn't "new". This has been the semi-standard approach for games over the past couple years (decade?).
DRM at launch to protect quarter one sales. Remove DRM a year or two later as one of the final patches. It builds up good will with people who want to be able to "play this game forever" and probably reduces licensing fees to denuvo or securom or whatever.
Not every game does it and the fantasy of "We are going out of business. Time to make my last act to be removing DRM from my game" never made sense. But a lot have.
1Doom eternal was cracked on day one of release. I believe in this instance, they "accidentally" pushed an update with an unprotected version.
When your game is as good as this one was, piracy can actually help to move more retail units.ID software and Bethesda know this better than most.
It only hurts sales when your product is trash.
2
Permanently Deleted
23And tempering!
5And ripping!
3
Considering that this shitty DRM doesn't actually stop the game from being pirated, why even bother doing it?
14Some guy had success selling the idea that it does stop pirating to someone in management or something.
18Because the sales in the first weeks matters the most. A lot of people always want the latest things either for free or in the worst case, they will have to pay . Denuvo has shown that the anti piracy mechanism are effective enough to stop a working cracked version to appear at day one or two. In some cases it took people 2 to 4 days to release a working version without Denuvo. So its an easy gamble for publisher to release a version with Denuvo. https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-denuvo/
7
Good to hear Denuvo being removed but overall bad that it was ever included. If I'm ever looking for more DOOM 2016 then I know it exists.
14You'll be disappointed if you're looking for "more DOOM 2016"- Eternal is a different beast entirely. Feels much more like a realtime first person puzzle game than a mindless arena shooter. Knowing enemy weak points and what guns do the most damage to that specific enemy + micromanaging ammo, health and armor is a BIG part of Eternal's gameplay loop. It's very good, but it's quite far removed from 2016 in terms of gameplay.
2It’s also more fast pace too
1
Surprised that it still had Denuvo up until now. I'm pretty sure they accidentally released a Denuvo-free executable on the day the game launched so the game was pretty much cracked instantly.
I doubt Denuvo helped their initial sales at all. Doom Eternal is a good game and that's what actually makes them money, not stopping the pirates out there.
13All denuvo has to do is generate more sales than it costs to license. And it seems it does given how popular it is. If it wasn't a profit generating thing for games companies then absolutely they wouldn't pay for it.
3
Ran like shit for me at launch. Maybe I should give it another try now.
5It's been running like a dream for a long time I can only imagine it runs impeccably
2
crys in armored core 6. even thou it's really easy to run it without easy anti cheat
5@vividspecter What does this mean?
1It just means Denuvo DRM was removed, which can cause issues with offline setups. Probably won't affect performance unless it was particularly poorly implemented.
3
Did it have issues before? I used it on my SD a long time ago and it seemed fine
1I didn't realize it had Denuvo. Maybe their claims that Denuvo doesn't impact performance isn't as much of a lie as I'd thought. I'm still waiting on them to post benchmarks though.
0Looks more like a tricky headline. There's 2 claims there: Denuvo was removed. The game plays great on the Deck. The headline is just making it look like one lead to the other.
The article actually says "now that it's removed, maybe it plays even better." But doesn't tell us if it does.
Not to say Denuvo doesn't have a performance impact, this just isn't a smoking gun.
4