WB Games seems to have hit the proverbial nail in Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League’s coffin.
As reported by Dexerto, they have added Denuvo to the game on Steam, mere days before the title’s official launch.
Denuvo is a form of third party DRM that game publishers use to discourage piracy of their games. What makes Denuvo extremely unpopular is that the DRM often harms the performance of the games that have it. More than inconveniencing gamers, it’s an industry practice that has been proven to make games worse.
But as unpopular as this DRM scheme is, gamers aren’t likely to convince publishers to stop using Denuvo. That’s because the company does have a track record of being successful at discouraging attempts to hack and break the DRM scheme. It’s become known among gamers that there is only one particular hacker who can consistently break Denuvo in a relatively short amount of time, and she doesn’t do this regularly.
But even then, if an army of hackers sprouted up tomorrow to try to break Denuvo, it wouldn’t change things in the long run. Many publishers end up removing Denuvo after a few months anyway, as they only want the protection during the period where games get most of their sales; which is the launch period.
Now, just a few days earlier, Team Tekken head and Bandai Namco producer Katsuhiro Harada very vocally debunked rumors that they would use Denuvo on Tekken 8. For a niche title looking to expand its user base, Tekken can’t afford to alienate fans with every little issue. Denuvo was blamed for many of the performance issues on the game’s predecessor, Tekken 7.
Gamers and developers have made conflicting claims on how harmful Denuvo is. Denuvo has stated in the past that its systems don’t interfere with online systems, in response to claims that they did that very same thing.
So, we don’t quite know how Denuvo will affect Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. WB Games do seem to be hedging on the bet that they can overcome bad publicity, in the same way that they pulled it off with Hogwarts Legacy last year. Indeed, we will find out soon enough if enough bad press has come around this game for gamers to reject it, or if Rocksteady and the DC Comics license is big enough to overcome all of it.
Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League will be released on February 2, 2024, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam. It is also arriving to PC via Epic Game Store on March 5, 2024.
