Doom: Eternal Review-Bombed as People Protest Denuvo Anti-Cheat

The internet, the gaming community, and game critics alike were thrilled when Doom Eternal first launched, and have lavished heaps of praise and memes upon it to show their affection. And for the most part, this praise is deserved: it’s fun blowing up demons, and in Doom Eternal, you blow up a lot of demons.

That said, you may recall that last week, Bethesda announced that the very first update for the game, not-so-creatively called Update 1, was going to bring a host of changes to the game, such as empowered demons and improved swimming mechanics, but they also revealed they planned to slip some anti-cheat software into the game. Most people didn’t pay that much attention to that tidbit.

At least, until Update 1 launched, and it was revealed that Bethesda was going to be using Denuvo Anti-Cheat. Which, if you weren’t aware, is anti-cheating software so despised by fans most of them would rather contend with cheaters and hackers than have anything by Denuvo running on their PCs. This has led to an enormous review-bombing campaign, with the once “overwhelmingly positive” game on steam currently rated as “Mixed”… although that’s only in the “recent reviews” part. Overall reviews are still “Very Positive”, because again, people really, really liked this game before this whole debacle.

As for the reason people dislike Denuvo anti-cheat, it’s pretty straightforward: it’s incredibly invasive, and it impacts the quality of the game. It’s always-on, it gets access to nearly every part of your PC (Denuvo claims they don’t harvest data, but that doesn’t really help much), and there are people who claim it makes their game run worse, or not be able to run at all.

So far, Bethesda hasn’t commented on this particular trend. They wouldn’t be the first studio to step back from using Denuvo after backlash, but they also wouldn’t be the first to stubbornly stick to their guns. I guess we’ll see which is it sooner or later.