Doom: The Dark Ages, Bethesda’s recently released prequel to the demon slaughtering first-person shooter, is using anti-piracy software that’s locking out Linux users who paid for the game.
According to multiple posts on Reddit, Doom: The Dark Ages uses the infamous anti-piracy software Denuvo. One Reddit user on the Linux gaming subreddit said that they were getting a black screen in the game when using FSR, AMD’s technology for upscaling and frame generation which basically makes games look better and run faster. In an attempt to troubleshoot the problem, this person tried testing the game on different versions of Proton, a compatibility layer developed by Valve that allows games that were designed to run on Windows to work on Linux-based operating systems. Denuvo detected these tests as “multiple activations” of the game, and locked the Reddit user out of the game for 24 hours.
This problem isn’t unique to Doom: The Dark Ages, but an issue with Denuvo that has riled gamers for years and is one of many reasons they hate the digital rights management (DRM) software so much. In theory, by keeping track of how many machines the game is being activated on, Denuvo has another way of checking if one copy of the game is somehow being pirated and installed on multiple machines. Steam forum posts going back as far as 2017 show that players are sometimes blocked from launching games they paid for after five “activations.”
Admittedly, this is an edge case, but players might want to install and play the game on multiple machines, or, as is the case with Linux users cycling through different implementations of Proton, the same machine that Denuvo decides is actually multiple machines. Some hardware upgrades, or troubleshooting by cycling certain components in and out of the same PC build could also cause Denuvo to detect the game as being launched on multiple devices.
I should note that Proton has been a huge boon for Linux gaming because it makes so many more games compatible. Clearly it’s not perfect, but as more people try to play games that use Denuvo on Linux, especially because of the rising popularity of the Steam Deck, Valve’s mobile gaming device which uses Proton, this will only become a bigger issue.
Denuvo is maligned by pirates because it’s a relatively effective form of anti-piracy software. Even if it’s circumvented eventually, it often prevents people from pirating games at launch, which is when they make a ton of money from sales and when they’re in high demand by pirates. However, Denuvo is also hated by gamers who have no interest in pirating games because it interferes with their ability to play games they bought legitimately. This ranges from Denuvo negatively impacting how well games run, or requiring them to connect to the internet in order to play games that don’t have meaningful online features. It’s so hated that someone made a Steam curator page with almost 40,000 followers that tracks which games use Denuvo so they can avoid buying them.
Again, the Doom: The Dark Ages scenario people are describing on Reddit is an edge case, but what adds insult to injury is that some of these people paid for the premium $100 version of the game specifically because it was supposed to give them access to it a day earlier. Those people paid $100 for a game they can’t play at all for 24 hours because of Denuvo.
Bethesda, which published Doom: The Dark Ages, and Denuvo, did not respond to a request for comment.
