Well, folks, I have good news regarding DRMs for once. After today’s outrage concerning Sony’s new PlayStation DRM that locks your games if you don’t connect to the internet every 30 days, we have a case of a company removing an invasive DRM from its game before it even came out, which should serve as inspiration for other publishers to do the same.
The game in question is the upcoming Star Wars: Galactic Racer, which, as per SteamDB, no longer has Denuvo. In fact, the Denuvo DRM label, which has to be displayed on the Steam store page of any game that contains it, was also removed, indicating that the most invasive and complex mainstream DRM is almost certainly gone. This is amazing news for everyone who’s experienced first-hand the nuisance that modern DRMs are and will likely see the game perform and load better and faster now that the DRM is gone.
And of course, over on social media, players are ecstatic to see this development. On the PC Gaming subreddit, one user said they’ll gladly purchase the game now that it has no Denuvo, while another very gleefully called Galactic Racer a “game worth buying.” Others theorized about why Secret Mode decided on this move all of a sudden and with no prior warning, with the leading suggestion being that the publisher took note of all the recent Denuvo cracks and simply “noped out.”
A few weeks ago I wrote how Denuvo games were being cracked more quickly than ever before, and in the days since yet another mainstream title was breached, Resident Evil Requiem, which marked the first game running the latest version of Denuvo Anti-Tamper to be cracked the traditional way. Hypervisor “cracks,” which bypass Denuvo altogether, have also become a popular way for pirates to get into games without having to even crack them at all, though these methods are rather unsafe as they require low-level access to your machine—and I think that’s a path no one except for the end user should tread.
Removing such an invasive DRM from the game almost guarantees that it’ll perform much better on lower-end hardware, especially for users that rely on weaker CPUs and slower drives. As things stand, we do not know if Secret Mode is going to implement another, more sturdy DRM instead of Denuvo, and there are far worse options performance-wise, as we’ve already seen in the case of Resident Evil 4 Remake and its Enigma DRM solution.
At any rate, I wholeheartedly would love to see publishers dropping Denuvo and other aggressive DRMs simply because they keep a good chunk of the audience locked out of certain games and degrade the experience overall. Performance is usually noticeably worse whenever one of these solutions is implemented, which just results in pirates, who disable the DRM entirely, getting a better deal without paying a dime.
It’s a disservice to paying customers to have a worse experience than those who do not pay at all, and as we’ve now seen even with the latest and most advanced versions of Denuvo, no DRM can last forever, no matter how sophisticated.
