I’ve never bought or played a game with Denuvo, but I want to get Final Fantasy VII Revelation on launch and the PC version will have Denuvo, according to the Steam page.
How big a problem is this typically? Can I expect it to work on Linux?
I could go for the PS5 version, but the last game (FF7 Rebirth) had a shitty performance mode on PS5, and my PC is a good bit more powerful. So I’d lean toward PC if it’s viable.
It seems like a safe bet that Square-Enix willl eventually ditch Denuvo, since they do that for most of their games. So I’m not too worried long-term but I want a smooth experience day 1.
Normally I’d wait for user reports, but I definitely want to play on day 1, so I’ll be one of the users reporting instead. :)
What’s your experience been if you’ve been stuck with Denuvo before?
If Steam ever shuts down, an old Reddit post had info about a customer experience message chain where a Valve representive said they had contingency plans if that ever happens.
If there’s third-party DRM on top of the regular Steamworks DRM, the game you bought has much worse odds of actually working offline if Valve goes out of business or the devs abandon it. That’s why I try to avoid Denuvo.
That being said, I’ve played Denuvo games on my system and any performance drops have been minimal at best. YMMV on that, but I’m a mid-end gamer at best. A certain athetic woman will provide alternative access to the game if you really want to skip Denuvo, but it should be fine.
But Denuvo is just silly and pointless. It sets out to be an anti-piracy measure, but it’s not actually preventing games from being cracked at all. Game studios should prevent piracy by making a high-quality, consumer-friendly product. I would never pirate a GOG game, but I can’t say the same for Ubisoft.
You can use bottles to install and run said games
I am pretty certain that Steam killswitch is used by crackers. As the cracked dll works for multiple games(or all? I hardly pirate games) and it seems to’ve been the same crack that patches out steam drm for 2 decades now.
Valve’s refusal to fix it, earned them some kudos. Giving trust that my steam games continue working even if steam is gone.
I’ve heard this rumor repeated many times, but I’ve never seen a real source. I doubt it’s something Valve could actually promise.
It may or may not actually pan out, especially since there’s a good chance that Valve will outlive Gabe Newell. And that’s why it’s really good get your games on GOG and Itch before resorting to Steam. But sometimes Steam’s the only game in town, and I’m wishing for the best for my library.
I have my doubts too. I don’t know of this is even legally possible. And in case Valve does that, the servers could get shut down very quickly with an order; if that is not legal at all, I don’t know.
Yeah, this is the first time I’ve thought about pirating a game I could buy in like 25 years. Good job, Square!
But it did for a long, long time. It’s only this year that Denuvo has become reliably circumvented outside of a few outliers.