‘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.
- well cheaters sure do ruin online games…
  
  That's anticheat, not drm

you aren't buying doom because it has denuvo. im not buying doom because i am boycotting microsoft products. we are probably a little similar
- Also it's $80 fucking dollars for the base edition. Everyone complaining about Nintendo game pricing but Doom gets a pass apparently.

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.

I'm more and more convinced that Doom 2016 was the peak. Eternal had that one song that kicked ass but that was mostly it.
- Doom 2 was the peak. 2016 was a strong reimagining of Doom 3, but it was already trying to be something Doom wasn't.
  
  I disagree. Doom 3 was trying to be constant darkness and horror. Never forget the lack of duct tape. Doom 2016 was a strong sequel to 2 with its wide open spaces and fast-paced action.
  I don't want to feel like I'm being hunted by scary monsters. I want to be the monster.

While it has Denuvo it can get fucked, they'll remove it in a few years, I'm a very patient gamer with a family group that has 1.5k games in library.
- Same, I'm happy to wait for Denuvo to be removed, for the game patches to come out, and Nvidia to fucking fix their god damn drivers. Plus side, I'll pay a reasonable price for the game when I buy it.

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)
  
  Actually, I think that might be harder than you'd imagine, at least as things work right now
  Valve would probably need something in the Proton API to help ensure programs don't think each version is a different PC as that is kinda the point of how Wine/Proton work (by creating a fake virtual PC and running things through that), or change how prefixes are handled so that all proton versions default to the same prefix (which would have other issues im sure)
  None of which would be a problem if they just exported the game from their software into a native Linux format, of course. Doom runs on Unreal, yeah? Should take 0 effort to make a native Linux version of the game, but they won't
  
  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.

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 💀
- I have FSR working (Win10+ AMD 7900XTX), but it's obvious that they have screwed the pooch in optimization.
  I just finished Doom: Eternal yesterday before the Dark Ages came out and it ran fully maxed out at 1440p @ 240 FPS without upscaling and was gorgeous.
  Dark Ages looks pretty much the same as Eternal, but runs at 120-144 FPS.
  That's still absolutely playable but how did it lose 50% performance in an IDTech game?
  
  How did you get it working? I'm getting like 40 FPS over here.
  
  how did it lose 50% performance in an IDTech game?
  One game has Denuvo, the other doesn’t.

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.
- Why pirate when you can look for alternatives

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.

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. 😭

Gonna be honest, if Dark Ages represents the future of Doom: Doom died with Eternal. I've played probably 75% of the game and it's enough to turn me off of every future title.
Edit: Bizarre fucking takes in this thread. How many of you that liked DA played on controller?
Final edit: liking Dark Ages and disliking Eternal is like preferring lunchables to a NYC slice.
- doom past doom 2 never felt like doom anyhow.
  
  Ultimate Doom which was doom2 with harder levels was great fun as well, but yeah, doom2.exe was peak.
- Hard disagree. Doom Eternal was a rhythm game disguised as an FPS and I hated it. It's crazy to me how widely acclaimed it was even over Doom 2016, which I thought was amazing. I'm glad they shifted back towards a more grounded FPS style that doesn't force you to juggle your entire weapon arsenal nonstop the entire game.
  
  I really enjoyed 2016, couldn't get into Eternal though. I'm definitely going to hold off on this new one until it's been out longer and goes on sale, unless it gets standing ovations. Then, if I don't like it I haven't lost much.
  
  Yeah I called it Doom Doom Revolution.
  Still cool tho
  
  Could you elaborate on the „rythm game“ part?
  I get that eternal was way more saturated and faster, but Rythm?
  
  If Doom Eternal is a rhythm game, what does that make Metal: Hellsinger aka "Doom but as a rhythm game"?
  https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061910/Metal_Hellsinger/
  (really great game btw)
  
  Is Dark Ages really more grounded? What the hell does that mean here?
  I had issues with Eternal demanding I use the weapons the way the devs intended, but when I saw parrying was a central part in Dark Ages, it was an easy decision to wait. Icon of Sin was peak because it was chaos management. I managed the Marauders, but just couldn't be assed to beat the Dark Lord.
  Good thing the indie scene is making their own Doom likes.
  
  A rhythm game?
  Who did you get that from? Doom Eternal is in no way a rhythm game, weapon swapping was no different from 2016 to DE. The only enemy that 'requires' it is the marauder and god forbid you need to switch between two weapons.
  No, better to strip everything that made Doom good - down to the fucking double jump. Bad joke.
- Doom died with Ethernal. Dark Ages is just more of that decline.
  
  The idea that anyone likes doom 2016 without liking dark ages despite dark ages being more of a gameplay successor to 2016 - genuinely fucking baffling.
- I believe it depends on the player’s personal playstyle. I’ve played Doom 3, Doom 2016, and Doom Eternal. Doom 3 is for fans of horror-focused FPS games, Doom 2016 offers action at a normal pace, and Doom Eternal feels like a high-speed dance.
  I’ll try Dark Ages next year, but I think if they had added even more mechanics than the Eternal had, the game might be more like an RPG than an FPS.
  
  I think they did bring back Doom RPG best phone game ever
  
  Dark ages is a dumbed down version of doom 2016. That is the best way I can describe it.
  And, I'm sorry - but doom 3 was just bad.
- What don't you like about it?
  
  Every single encounter is braindead. There are like 8 true demons. There are 3-4 weapons (the others are worthless), and literally never a reason to use any of them but the impaler and the BFC (which is functionally completely different than the BFG).
  I have not used my brain for any of the encounters. I throw my shield to deal with checks notes 80% of the encounter, spamming parry and impaler headshots to simply annihilate every boss or even remotely threatening enemy.
  The game is fucking boring.
  Edit: this isn't even discussing the fact that it seems like every encounter is dEfEaT eNeMiEs To BrEaK sHiElD. Very dumbed down sequel to 2016.

i wanted to buy it because i know it will be good.
but ill pirate it instead as soon as its cracked. thanks ill save myself the money, you fucks.
- 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!
- Play Selaco my friend
  
  omfg, I wasn't looking for suggestions! I said I would play Oblivion, I played Oblivion. I had a fucking great night. Had pizza for dinner, got a little drunk, finished the shivering isles main quest... 10/10 friday evening, thanks. jfc
- 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.
  
  so I am sure the cost of supporting Linux users was not worth it.
  What's so fucking annoying about these DRM issues is that basically all of the AntiCheat and DRM we have WORK ON LINUX IF YOU ENABLE ONE FUCKING SETTING
  Easy AntiCheat for example is quite literally a checkbox at some point of compiling or whatever, I've seen someone do 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.
  
  If even not that, perhaps you can look into [wning

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

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

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.
  
  Do you also rate books by the number of pages?
  This attitude here is what has fucked up gaming more than any greedy publisher ever did.

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.
- Orcs & Elves
  dude, sick, i never heard of this one 👍

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.

Selaco is much better than this. It's basically F.E.A.R+Classic doom
It runs on linux & utilizes the GZDoom engine & for some reason attacked by the anti-woke mob
- Just torrent your games.
  Stop rewarding companies for taking advantage of you.
  
  Just don't run their shitty silicon burners on your system and get some good stuff.
  Support teams that are willing to make builds for the latest Arch release (and tell me too if you find any :P).
  I have narrowed down my "to pay" list to GoG + Linux games, only problem being, since they are not open source, we still depend upon them rebuilding the binaries for the latest systems. Otherwise, we need to then keep an older version of Ubuntu for it. Really wish GoG pushed Debian as a standard for those cases (for old games which the dev might not rebuild), because Ubuntu ages worse than Debian, when out of LTS.

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

Why though?
- Read the article?

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.

but the linux circlejerk swears game support is on par with windows!
- It's because of testing the game on different versions of Proton, which is treated as a hardware change. The fault lies entirely with Denuvo, and with anti-consumer DRM in general.
- I'm not a huge Linux stan, but it's pretty damn close to it. I rarely run into compatibility issues, and when I do, there's a very high chance a workaround exists. Hell, there's even times when a game actually runs smoother on Linux.
  In regards to the topic at hand, Denuvo's activation limit fucks over Windows users, too. It just happens far more often due to the compatibility layer (e.g. proton, wine, etc) making it look like it's a new computer trying to access the Denuvo servers for a game each time you change it when testing (e.g. proton v8, v9, experimental, etc). That being said, you don't usually need to change the version that often. I usually only need to try 1-3 versions before finding one that works the best, and I think the Denuvo daily limit is like 4-5, but I could be wrong.
- And the windows circlejerk says private, secure, performant OSes that also play most games are trash not worth trying. Hm.
  
  It's not a circlejerk to want to play a game I've paid for
- It is if anti-cheats & DRMs are not included in the package
- You seem like a sad and angry person
- It is, except for the ones that come with built in APTs.
- Rule 1 of Lemmy: Worship Linux, or be subjected to poor treatment, unfortunately.