Hello and welcome to Replay, WIRED’s rundown of all of the week’s big videogame news. This week we’ve got updates from EA and G2A, and some details on that Doom Eternal anti-cheat software that pretty much no one liked. Let’s dive right in.
Doom Eternal Gains, Then Quickly Loses, Anti-Cheat Software
If there’s one thing PC gamers hate, it’s Denuvo’s anti-cheat software. The software, which often gets included as part of PC games to deter scofflaws, is generally seen as extremely intrusive, requiring kernel-level access—which some players say causes performance issues and generally feels unsafe. After all, why would anyone want to give their copy of Fortnite deep access to all of their computer’s files? Some people even say Denuvo gets flagged by virus protection programs. Like, what happens if someone cracks that software? So when a big game, like, say, id Software’s Doom Eternal adds Denuvo after launch, it can make players pretty upset.
As Kotaku reports, that’s exactly what happened, and the uproar was enough for Eternal‘s executive producer Marty Stratton to announce that the software would be removed, just a week after the studio first added it in an update. “Despite our best intentions, feedback from players has made it clear that we must reevaluate our approach to anti-cheat integration,” Stratton wrote in a Reddit post. Now if only the players had a way to communicate that anger without, y’know, review-bombing the game on Steam. One thing at a time.
EA Is Releasing the Source C