Not being satisfied with shitting all over the Fallout franchise, Bethesda Softworks have now managed to effectively ruin the Doom franchise.
It's a bait and switch, two months after a successful release, swapping a decent game with a malware-ridden executable. No way in hell is Denuvo getting to run anything in kernelspace on my systems. They can fuck right off in fact. The only non-Microsoft kernelspace items in my system are items controlling hardware I've installed. There's no software-only components, at least as far as I can verify at this point in time..
Denuvo are by definition an untrustable company. Given they came up with SecuROM in the first place, they can go to hell for that. Also, seeing the heavy load that the Denuvo Anti Tamper places on a modern game, they can go to hell for that too, unnecessary crap getting in the way of what I paid for.
The insidious thing about this situation is that it feel as though Bethesda are using this quietly sideloaded addition patch of a successful game to insert the testing of the market to the DAC crap, in a move to see if it'll fly for their next instalment of whatever microtransaction-laden and grind-full game they've planned next. DAC is specifically tailored to ensure that the single-player "experience" is as the game publishers want it to be. No more trainers to bypass long and useless grinds that can be bypassed by purchase of something. I also suspect that there are people at ID that are aghast at the requirements from their owner for the inclusion of this shit in the game they spent so long working on, hence the very explicit notes in the release notes calling out the presence of Denuvo malware.
I've at least received my refund already, within a few hours of realising that Bethesda were breaking European consumer laws with this update (the game is no longer fit for the stated purchased purpose after all, it's now a real security risk) I had uninstalled the game from all of my systems and notified steam of the requirement for refund. Hopefully it'll add to the statistics that Steam can beat Bethesda over the head with - and a possibility that Valve will take note that customers will not stand to have their systems abused in this manner.
I've also left a scathing negative review on Steam - and of what a beautiful graph the past 54 hours are showing on Steam, with at least a 10-1 ratio of negative to positive reviews. There's no possibility to astroturf their way out of that one.
The fact that the mainstream media hasn't had a chance to get the information out there (later on a Friday when the update was pushed after all..) it'll be very interesting to see just how much mainstream news takes the idea that a game publisher is performing a bait and switch, and opening a major security hole on many many PCs. Will there be notes in the broadsheets on Monday with this information, that there's a huge number of refunds being given to gamers when their game was destroyed by the publisher?
Also interesting to see who are among the major shareholders in Bethesda - iirc TenCent are about 10% owners of Bethesda Softworks, so you can see the lack of problems from that group with the opening of security holes on non-Chinese computers..