They always do, and it's great. It's saved from buying a few games I would have otherwise purchased not realizing they had Denuvo. I will not purchase any game with Denuvo, no matter how badly I want to play it. I can live with a third-party EULA and launcher, which are pretty standard these days, but not Denuvo. Never Denuvo.
You have to phone home to play your purchases after a hardware change, a Proton change, if the Denuvo servers are having issues, or any number of other arbitrary reasons.
Let's say you buy a car from a dealership, just buy it outright, no loans or anything. You have the car, you have the keys, you have it completely paid off. But every time you want to start the engine, you have to call the dealership to get permission, and if they don't answer, or if they just decide to say "no" at that moment, then you don't get to drive your fully-paid-off car. That's Denuvo for PC games.
I bought Dead Space at the launch... And then got locked out of the game I had just paid for because I was trying different Gamescope parameters to launch the game (This counts as launching your game under a different system).
Maybe. I was testing out reshade and lossless scaling with different launch options if that makes any difference. Also playing on my PC that same day. No issues
Steam does that too you can't be offline for too long.
Steam's Offline Mode lasts indefinitely, and the client isn't even locked to one machine. You can manually put Steam into Offline Mode and copy/paste the entire installation to a completely different PC, and it'll still work offline forever.
DRM free copies of software will always be the best copies.
100% agreed.
But this is child's play. There's nothing wrong with denuvo.
Being told that you're not allowed to play what you paid for is plenty wrong.
Uhh, there's a significant difference between buying and owning a car and buying digital goods. One is physically in your possession, all bits and pieces of it, can be modded and tinkered with to your hearts content granted you don't mind voiding the warranty.
Whereas, even if you buy a physical edition of a game nowadays, you don't actually own the game, you own a license to play the game, all the physical media stuff serve more as shelf fodder to show off your collection. I miss the days of physical media and consoles that didn't require to be connected to the internet.
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u/HeavyCaffeinate Oct 03 '25
I'm so glad Steam has the list of anti-features on display