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Ah, Denuvo, the forever enemy of PC gamers. The anti-tamper software’s inclusion in most modern game releases rarely ever goes down well, but something that is almost always a universal win is when a developer finally goes ahead and removes it. Which is exactly what’s just happened to Final Fantasy 16.
It’s pretty common for publishers to drop Denuvo anywhere from six months to two years after a game releases on PC, mostly once sales die down and piracy is less of a concern to the bigwigs.
In Final Fantasy 16’s case, it’s taken just under half a year before Square Enix has decided it’s time for Denuvo to go, with the DRM removed on March 4, according to SteamDB. With the software routinely linked by naysayers to things like stutters, framerate drops, and a myriad of other performance issues—plus that iddy-biddy issue of making it harder for pirates to crack the game—it’s sure to be good news all round for those who aren’t the biggest fan of DRM.
I suppose it’s even better news for those who didn’t fancy shelling out 50 bones for a classic Square Enix PC port, one Rock Paper Shotgun called “so up-and-down that you’ll likely never achieve a perfectly smooth ride.” Not that I’m here encouraging anyone to go and engage in illicit activities, mind you. Wait for a Steam sale or something you goblins.
It is funny, though, considering that Final Fantasy 15 continues to be all DRM-ed up seven years after its release. That seems to be down to the fact that sometime between the two games, the way publishers pay for Denuvo changed to something closer to a subscription-based service. That means it makes a lot of sense to strip it from Clive and co, but less so to go out of its way to remove it from Noctis and the boys.
Denuvo’s rocky reputation continues to persist, despite the company pushing to change the narrative. It started off with a Denuvo Discord server last year, a move which—and hell, even I could have predicted this—did not go down very well. A mere two days after its creation the entire thing was locked down into read-only mode because mods couldn’t keep up with the sea of obscenities that came flooding in.
We then had a sob story just a couple of weeks later, when product manager Andreas Ullman told PC Gamer: “It even breaks my heart a bit to see how our solutions, especially the anti-piracy solution, are picked up by the community. Because I think it’s not fully understood the benefits that our solution can bring, because preventing piracy, you earn more through your game, which is then reinvested into making greater games.”
Mind you, Ullman then followed that up by admitting “I don’t have any proof for it, but probably, if our solution does not exist, maybe there are some great games that never get developed.”
Whatever the case is for Denuvo, all I know is that folks are happy when they see it gone. Will its exclusion improve Final Fantasy 16’s disappointing sales, though? Probably not.
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Kurt Indovina
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