Playdead Studios announced over on the Steam page that they made some minor fixes to their game Inside while also doing something a lot of people didn’t see coming: they removed the Denuvo anti-tamper DRM.

Some people don’t care about DRM and essentially move to ignore it. However, it’s something that prevents a lot of legitimate gamers from enjoying their games. Crackers, hackers and pirates get to play and enjoy DRM-laden titles for free, while paying customers have to jump through hoops to play a piece of software they paid for.

Users have clamored into the comment section to shoot praises to Playdead for removing the DRM from their side-scrolling, platforming puzzle game. Others raised issues that many might call “food for thought” regarding the cost of DRM versus the loss of sales. User Max Is Back wrote…

“It took six weeks to crack Inside, not six months. Still a critical 6 weeks for sales, but Denuvo ain’t cheap. I have to question the return on investment, considering that “investment” includes the money they need to pay Denuvo Software Solutions and the loss of business / goodwill from customers who refuse to buy Denuvo-protected games. Just some food for thought.”

According to a post on Reddit where someone claims to have contacted Denuvo under the guise of being an indie dev in order to get info on pricing and security measures, it costs about €100,000 to secure AAA titles moving 500,000 more units on PC, so games like Doom, Total War: Warhammer or Stellaris might be covered by this measure. AA games selling less than 500,000 units have a €50,000 fee, and indie games allegedly cost about €10,000 to secure.

The pricing is actually a lot lower than some people may have imagined, but it likely doesn’t make customers anymore accepting of DRM. Most people just want to boot up their game and play, but Denuvo likely makes it easier for executives at companies to rest easy at night knowing that for the first sales quarter of their big AAA release, they don’t have to worry about a several thousand pirates eating into sales.