It’s common practice for PC games today to launch with Denuvo, a form of DRM designed to stop the spread of pirated copies of games, and it’s also common practice for developers to remove Denuvo several months after launch as interest (and the risk of piracy) dwindles. Less common is a developer publicly announcing it’s removing Denuvo from a game before it’s even out, but that’s the surprise Starbreeze pulled this Friday.
“Hello heisters, we want to inform you that Denuvo is no longer in Payday 3,” the developer wrote in a post on Steam on Friday. That’s pretty much the whole message—short and to the point, and seemingly a win on the good will front, with the Steam post racking up 524 thumbs up on Steam so far and another 10,000 or so on Twitter.
Payday 3 is less than a week away from its September 21 release, and Starbreeze is clearly looking to roll into the launch with an excited community behind it. Two months ago a thread on the r/paydaytheheist subreddit called out the inclusion of Denuvo and the responses were characteristically negative. This afternoon, one of the game’s developers responded to that thread to highlight that Denuvo has been removed.
Denuvo has long had a reputation for hindering performance in games and bloating their executables, though the company behind it, Irdeto, insists that isn’t the case. This summer it announced a plan to provide media outlets with two versions of games, one with Denuvo included and one without, to prove it has no impact on performance.
Damn that’s sad to hear.
All they had to do was remake payday 2 with a few improvements/new puzzles/ maps and they would have made bank.
Payday 2 sold 40 million copies full AAA price too (like 79$ back then or wtv). They should have had the money to make a good game.
Tbh I’m not really a fan of this stance either. If I’m buying a sequel I expect meaningful improvements, otherwise you’re just ripping me off for something that could have been a dlc or expansion to the first game.
Tbh, a large part of payday2’s problems stem from being built on a racing game engine. Redoing pd2 on unreal straight would be of course a lot of work, but the end result would be a better product that I would pay for. Payday3 on the other hand doesn’t look like something that I would enjoy based on the fact unlike pd2.
I played the beta.
It’s prettier Payday 2 with some quality of life tweaks. Plus it’s cross platform multiplayer which means I can PC with my Xbox friends.
That other guy is just salty. Whatever, it’s a brand new game for $40, not $70. I’d say give gamepass a shot if ya wanna rent it for a month.
deleted by creator