mankind, one of my most anticipated games of 2021, was Denuvo will act as Digital Rights Management (DRM). But after the developers found that this was affecting performance, they immediately took it out.
The strategy game that evolves civilization first real competition in Years, has been playable by fans and testers for a while, and these players have given feedback to Amplitude Studios during a closed beta. And some of that feedback was about some issues with Denuvo and how that affected game performance, something that Critics of the DRM / connoisseurs of liquid video games have been saying for some time
As a result, Amplitude has made the decision to remove Denuvo from the game before it is released on August 17th. Studio boss Romain de Waubert has described the decision in detail a forum postwhich reads (emphasis mine):
Hello everybody,
Thank you for your feedback on this, we have followed it up and had internal discussions before we get back to you. Based on data from our study during closed beta, we decided not to include Denuvo in Humankind at launch.
First let me explain the reasons for our initial decision including Denuvo – we work really hard and put our hearts into these games we make and piracy really affects our ability to keep making games with you guys.
We have been working on this game for more than 4 years now and personally it has been my dream project for 25 years. We’ve been one of the most popular games on Steam this year, so we know we’re being attacked by pirates more than any of our previous games. If Denuvo can hold up a cracked version for even a few days, that can really help us to protect our start.
However, our priority is always to provide the best possible experience for the players who buy our games and support us. Denuvo should never compromise player performance and we don’t want to sacrifice quality for you.
We believe this can be done with the right integration, which is what we wanted to test out during the closed beta. However, we have found that the way it is currently integrated is not good enough and we cannot fix it before it is released. So let’s take it out.
I hope this answers your questions. Thank you as always for your support and we can’t wait to see you all at launch (and beyond!)
– Romain, CCO & Studio Manager
Wouldn’t it be nice if more studios could sort this out before a game is released? instead of afterwards. Of course, that doesn’t mean the game will never have DRM, but it at least suggests that if they replace Denuvo with something else, it won’t affect the player experience as much.
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