‘Doom: The Dark Ages’ DRM Is Locking Out Linux Users Who Bought the Game

Just another reason to wait long after release to buy a game. Denuvo charges games companies to administer the DRM infrastructure and most developers will strip it out of their games after it's been out for a while.

Buying games on launch is one of the most anti-customer experiences you can get. And that's saying something in our wonderful capitalist economy

Buying a game post-launch:
Better prices; often on sale.
Fixed and patched up.
Extra content often included.
DRM often removed.
No brainer, imo.
- You forgot a bonus point:
  Hardware requirements are now easier/cheaper to meet/exceed.
- Preordering games: I need this digital product before jt goes up in price or runs out of copies!
- Cons:
  maybe multiplayer isn't very populated if you wait too long
  ???
- Remember when games used to, at least sometimes... do actual internal beta testing to iron out performance bugs and such?
  Now we are all alpha and beta testers, all the time.
  Sometimes even AAA and 'AAAA' games release, and then unrelease before the alpha or beta is even done!
  Yeah, patient gaming for me, haven't preordered or gone into an early access game in almost a decade now...
Pirating single player games is unfortunately the way to go, considering you BUY a single player game and STILL get fucked on it.
- Disagree, like yesman (lol) said it's best to wait. I'm not that worried about playing games day one but I still want to sort the Devs, after they've patched out the bugs and removed DRM preferably
- Pirating is getting so hard for me that it’s becoming not an option. Comcast has started blocking vpn nodes for me, but only of I am torrenting. And if I turn off the vpn, DMCA notices out the ass. I’m kinda stuck.
Patient gamers represent! The older I get, the less I care about FOMO. The less I care about FOMO, the happier I am. It's a beautiful cycle.
/me goes back to playing snes games on an emulator
- A lot of things in life are improved once you excise the FOMO mind cancer.
- Yeah, there's so many good games and so little time, I don't understand how anyone wouldn't have a big backlog anyway.
They also typically go on really good sales right around the time denuvo gets removed.

Refund and wait for a crack. Fuck Denuvo and fuck Bethesda for using them

It's not really Bethesda anymore though is it? Either ID software or Microsoft, no?
- I completely forgot Microsoft bought Bethesda lol explains a lot

You get what you pay for. You buy denuvo, you get denuvo.

Yet more evidence that the smartest thing you can do if the game comes from a AAA studio is hold off on buying it for 6-12 months.

If the game comes with Denuvo, never, ever buy it.
- I think the point is that they often eventually remove Denuvo and it becomes a moot point.

Earlier this year, I got a game I liked on steam. Pretty much 3d Rimworld. After playing for 20 hours over a few weeks, I sporadically started getting errors about me having "no hardware activations" left for the game, and how I should wait 24 hours. I have never installed it on any other machine.

It is so very silly that a pirated copy would be the more seamless experience.

+1 tell us the title
- As someone guessed above - Stranded: Alien Dawn
What's the game?
- Kenshi is the only 3D Rimworld like game I know and wouldn't do anything like this.

I remember when their DRM was just telling you that you'd go to HELL if you pirated it.
- 🥺 pwease money?

All this drm nonsense ever does is punishes the paying customers and maybe delays cracked version by a few days, but fucking pencil pushers still put it into everything.

maybe delays cracked version by a few days
Denuvo has not been cracked since 2023. The only pirated copies of Doom Eternal were using a leaked denuvo-free build until Bethesda removed denuvo entirely 3 years after release, and unfortunately they didn't leak a denuvo-free build this time, so you are probably going to have to wait a couple of years or so.

This is why native support still matters. Anything not supported can pull the rug out from under you at any time.

Except for when glibc updates and breaks games with native support (but not the ones running through a compatibility layer). Although that definitely happens way less than devs purposefully pushing changes that break on Linux.
- Yeah, games through Proton are a bit like containerized apps, you get everything you need to run them in the Proton package.
- It looks like that got fixed anyway.
- Linux has never been good at running old binaries. It's always assumed that you are running software compiled for the current version if your distribution, and programs that are not available can be compiled from source (because you obviously use only open source software). For everything else you need to use compatibility layers that provide necessary environment.
I'm not following your argument. You're perfectly capable of having the rug pulled out from under you with a native Linux build too.

Also it's $80 fucking dollars for the base edition. Everyone complaining about Nintendo game pricing but Doom gets a pass apparently.

I never buy/install games with Denuvo. Guess it will be a while before I'm playing this.

Thanks to this news, there will be a version without Denuvo quite quickly. 🏴‍☠️

anti-consumer feature is anti-consumer. more news at 11

Fuck Microsoft. They enshittify everything and they support a genocide by helping to select targets to murder. No game is worth supporting this.

Microsoft isn't the only company helping Israel target children and women especially in there favourite location hospitals.
- How is this response remotely relevant to the comment you're responding to?
- This is true but Microsoft is the one which made the BDS list for being most responsible.

Denuvo identifies a user opening a game with multiple versions of Proton as multiple machines. It thinks that's piracy and locks the user out of the game

Seems like it should be an easy patch, right? Assuming they have any desire to (I think it "runs" on Steam Deck, so that might be enough incentive)
- Denuvo's whole schtick is that your unique system environment gets used as a part of the "unlocking key" of sorts, so it would definitely not be simple. For example windows users face the same issue with denuvo whenever windows updates, although obviously that doesn't happen often enough to be an actual issue.

Looks like sailing is back on the menu, boys!

It's not, newest Doom has Denuvo
- We'll get it, comrade.
- Sailing is back on the menu once Empress decides, I guess? Is Empress still the only one cracking Denuvo, or has the Denuvo Cracking scene changed much in the last 5-10 years? I don't really keep up with it much.

Urge to pirate, rising…

I've downloaded software that I had paid for, simply because of the bullshit involved with DRM, licence unlocking, etc.
If the user experience of a paid software or service is inferior to a pirated version, then the developers are doing something wrong.
- Same. At a minimum, I remember having to d/l no-CD cracks to get around the annoying and totally unnecessary disc DRM (that required you to insert the disc, just to prove you had it).
Necessity*
Or you could always just not play the game? Is that not an option?
- But I'm already doing that. I want to do my part to dissuade bad software practices.
  Who am I kidding I'm just going to keep working through the Cacowards forever.

Aside from screwing Linux users, they're also screwing AMD users with forced ray-tracing + broken FSR, and I'd imagine there's also a lot of overlap there.

Even amd users are suffering like Linux users Microsoft got no chill 💀

Only way for this to change is to vote with your (virtual) feet and wallet and "cancel" games that have DRM, in my opinion.

Good luck, there is DRM on almost every peace of software you buy. Most of it you never notice but it is there. I am guessing Id ~~Bethesda~~ Microsoft went a little too hard on their DRM and didn't learn from EAs blunder. We will probably have another Spore situation here and its becomes going to become the number one pirated game of 2025. Or maybe not, the last Doom game wasn't that great and I am assuming this one is trash too.
- There are a lot of indie/open games that are DRM-free. I refuse to think all good games are the ones with DRM
- With EA and Spore - SecuROM was a straight up root kit. Basically malware. Pretty sure on the Sims 2 forums there were people who had their computers bricked. (Sims 2 was already messy enough to reinstall sometimes, EA did lots of weirdness with the registry.)
  Sony did something similar with music CD’s. Their elaborate scheme to prevent you from ripping your CD’s more than three times or whatever created a vulnerability that was actively exploited by malware developers.

That probably explains all of the crashes reported by windows users too. ID Software what happened? You were supposed to be the chosen one.

Owned by zenimax, owned by microsoft. Same owners of activision blizzard. Shafted Mick Gordon. So this is kinda 100% as expected.
You must really fucking hate composers or not play games if you think ID is a contender for the best game studio.
- It used to be. 😭
Tim Willits

it won’t be cracked, you have to hope the devs leak the drm-free version

I get paid today and was gonna pick this up tonight... Guess it's back to Oblivion then!

Why? Cause irs new game marketed? Theres shit ton of games to play that are better. Even of the same genre. And you could pick up like 10 of them for the price of dark ages. And play them until dark ages is cheap.
- The fuck are you talking about? It's not about price, I'm on Linux. Did you read the article? I'm going to play Oblivion because I WANT to play Oblivion.

Man, they're taking the "dark ages" part seriously.

Seeing this pains me, especially considering Id Software's history with Linux. Prior to being bought by Bethesda, most of Id's games had official native Linux ports. Even Doom 3 had a native Linux port, it doesn't seem to work anymore but there are source ports like Dhewm3 available for it.

This is what happens when bean counters make the decisions. Linux is only 4% of market share so I am sure the cost of supporting Linux users was not worth it.
It wouldn't astonish me if this were a semi-deliberate act by microsoft. While they're trying very hard to expand to every platform, non-windows pcs seem to be the exception. Linux and OSX have the game gamepass support as your phone.

Didn't fall for it, even when they whisper sweet little lies in my ear, I just say to myself, I quit gaming. I'm done. If I can't own it, I ain't playing it. And now I just joined the class war. Because you know, there is no war but the class war.

I can't own it, I'm pirating it.
If I can’t own, I pwn.

Meanwhile, DRM-free Doom (2016) is here, it also runs quite good >>> https://www.gog.com/en/game/doom_2016

with good music too

Eh 70 dollars for 10 hours of repetitive gameplay is bad value anyway.

Don't tell competitive gamers that. LOL, CS, Overwatch, COD whatever is about a simple game loop for those who enjoy that loop.
No way, it’s only 10 hours? Eternal was longer than that, and so was 2016!
- I finished DOOM (2016) in 8.8 hours. Granted I didn't stop for collectables and was on normal mode. I tried Eternal but got bored after 2 hours so that's what I'm basing it off.
  My steam friends currently have about 17 hours (they bought it early) but they like collecting stuff and getting 100% achievements. I'm not sure how long the story is without 100%ing it but it shouldn't be too different from the other games.

Well cool, now I know not to pick up the game yet.

Was this before or after this: https://lemmy.world/post/29593011

Because I'm curious why Valve would have gone to so much trouble to make the game run on Linux just to ruin that.

Well the game runs well if you just launch it with only one Proton configuration and keep playing on that. The issue is changing the Proton version is recognized as multiple installations by the DRM and it locks you out after a couple of tries.
- This is what I didn't understand. Thank you for explaining.

After how id treated my man Mick Gordon, I'm torrenting cracked versions of their games here on out - pulling the patient gamer card.

Fuck the management at id. Just another corporate machine.

Aww, that's disappointing. Linux users with a DS or who use emulators should look into Orcs & Elves in the meantime. It's another fantasy-flavored FPS from ID and it's pretty good.

Only pay money for open source because you can actually own it

Pause?

am gonna stick to Classic Doom(including doom 64) ,thanks.

even tho i didnt play doom 64 for a while.

+Doesn't steam have DRM already

Not that I would have bought it - not my type of game - but this game gets on my blacklist.