Bethesda confirms Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will NOT have Denuvo

Denuvo anti-piracy tech has often been a sore point for gamers, especially on PC. However, many of you will be pleased to know that MachineGames’ Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will not be shipping with the offending DRM software when it launches on December 9.

This was confirmed by publisher Bethesda in a post on X recently. The message seems to be a reply to a now-deleted comment from a user, prompting the studio to say that The Great Circle “does not include Denuvo.” This was then followed by a statement declaring that it was only ever used in “review builds for leak precautions.”

Indeed, if you look on the game’s official Steam page, you can see down the right-hand side that a third-party EULA needs to be agreed to before playing the game, but there’s no mention of DRM in use anywhere. This should be good news for PC users.

Indiana Jones and the Stuttering Framerates

If you’re not familiar with it (you lucky, lucky people), Denuvo is a form of Digital Rights Management software that became more abundant during the early days of the internet as a means of protecting data on music CDs. These days, however, it’s typically associated with video games.

While publishers and studios implement it as a way of preventing intellectual properties from being pirated or tampered with illicitly, it can often lead to issues for the user. Denuvo is especially egregious on this front, with it being linked to low performance and persistent drops in framerates on games like Deathloop. Ergo: Denuvo is often seen as controversial, especially from a consumer/gamer perspective.

As such, many games have it removed post-launch, which is exactly what happened with Back 4 Blood, Lies of P, Doom Eternal, and more.

Given this, PC gamers will be pleased to know that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle shan’t be shipping with the contentious DRM software. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t ever be put in. If Denuvo can be removed after a game’s release, does that mean it can also be implemented after the fact? Only time will tell.