Bethesda removes Denuvo DRM from Doom Eternal

The time has come, it would seem, for Bethesda to rid Doom Eternal of one of its biggest faults: the infamous Denuvo DRM. Having launched in March of 2020, Doom Eternal featured one of the most tone-deaf implementations of Denuvo yet, hyping the DRM up as a “feature” via official channels. Subsequently, there was some amount of backpedaling from id Software on the topic with a temporary removal of the DRM, but Denuvo did eventually come back into the picture due to the game’s multiplayer mode. Now, three years following that particular series of stumbles, Doom Eternal no longer appears to have Denuvo on board.

This information comes from SteamDB, as highlighted by the community over at the r/Games subreddit. Bethesda itself didn’t announce the change or make a fuss of it in any way, shape, or form, which suggests the goal might’ve been to simply scrap the DRM while nobody was looking, and be done with it.

Is Bethesda distancing itself from Denuvo?

Denuvo DRM has, historically, been used as an early post-launch defensive measure against piracy, allowing developers and publishers to move copies of a given game without worrying too much about potential cracks and file tampering. To that end, keeping Denuvo around for years after a game comes out doesn’t necessarily make financial sense due to the costs of keeping the DRM around, and developers like Capcom haven’t been shy about removing it from the picture relatively quickly.

Denuvo has acknowledged its bad PR already, but it’s impossible to deny its ubiquity in the current market. Keeping this ubiquity in mind, it is rather curious that Bethesda would take Denuvo out of Doom Eternal right now, virtually alongside the release of Starfield. One would expect Bethesda to invest big bucks into keeping Starfield safe and sound from pirates, but the game doesn’t leverage Denuvo at all. If Bethesda isn’t going to use Denuvo for its flagship release, are there plans at the company not to use the anti-piracy software at all moving forward? Only time will tell, but it is an interesting development, regardless.