MachineGames has explained what they used Denuvo for in Indiana Jones And The Great Circle.
After word spread that gamers found Denuvo in the game’s code, MachineGames shared this statement on Twitter:
“Indiana Jones and the Great Circle does not include Denuvo. It was only in review builds for leak precautions.”
So, obviously, the first people who got to play Indiana Jones And The Great Circle prior to its launch this coming December 9 would be game press and content creators, who were given access to the game so that they could review them.
There are plenty of justifiable reasons for gamers to dislike Denuvo. On principle, consumers should definitely be demanding that game companies stop using DRM to control how people can play their games.
On another level, Denuvo is particularly controversial, because gamers figured out that they make games run worse. And when they found ways to remove Denuvo from those games, they were able to prove that those games could perform better, and drop several bugs and issues.
Now, we have to acknowledge that the industry continues to widely use Denuvo because it works. In many cases, the developers only have Denuvo at launch, and then remove it in a matter of months. In this way, they are able to protect those sales at launch, which also happens to be the period when games get most of their sales.
There are still many games that get sold to us with Denuvo and DRM measures in them permanently, and that’s why this continues to be a rigmarole for gamers.
But we would strain to find any reason to object to using Denuvo, or even any other DRM, to protect the game from leaks. In that situation, the game is not being sold or provided as a consumer product. Subsequently, the protections afforded to us as consumer rights do not apply.
And game companies definitely have every right to protect their work as much as they can. We have already seen that bad actors will act in bad faith, to share leaks in spite of breaking the trust of their sources, in one way or another.
For what it’s worth, the Steam listing does indicate you will need to agree to the game’s EULA. But it would have been unrealistic to hope that you could run this game on the Steam Deck anyway, or any PC gaming handheld.
None of them pass the bar for its minimum PC requirements, as they revealed yesterday. Short of some enterprising modders coming up with a way to make it work, or MachineGames making some bespoke version to run on those PC handhelds, you aren’t going to get the game running on them at all. You may as well get an Ultimate Game Pass subscription to cloud stream into your phone, or perhaps something novel like the Retroid Pocket 4.
