LogInUPD: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle doesn't have Denuvo, it was only present in review builds to combat potential leaks.
UPD: According to Bethesda, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will not have Denuvo – the version of the DRM seen on SteamDB was added only to review builds to combat potential leaks. All's well that ends well!
The original article: In case you missed the news, earlier today developer MachineGames unveiled the PC requirements for its upcoming game Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, set to hit the shelves in less than a week, causing confusion among the gaming community as to why the title requires GPUs as powerful as NVIDIA's 4000 series to run with full ray-tracing even on the lowest settings.
MachineGames
Less than 24 hours later, the most likely explanation for the puzzling requirement shifted from the game being poorly optimized – something not impossible considering that the game's publisher is Bethesda – to something many gamers would find even more perturbing, an issue that is unlikely to be fixed in the week-one patches: the presence of Denuvo.
Brought to our attention by Pirat_Nation, the addition of the disliked DRM took place quietly just a few hours ago at the time of writing, and, as of now, has not been disclosed on the game's official Steam page, only appearing in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle's update history log on SteamDB. While it's highly unlikely the studios intended to sneak Denuvo in under players' noses, given the significant attention the game is receiving, the fact that this addition happened mere days before launch – and around 1 day and 10 hours for those who have pre-purchased it – could certainly raise some eyebrows about Bethesda's intentions.
Even more interesting is that about a year ago, Bethesda was among the companies that chose to ditch Denuvo, removing it from the beloved action-packed FPS, DOOM Eternal. At the time, the studio didn't offer any explanation for the decision, which, coupled with Starfield not featuring the DRM from the start, led many (including yours truly) to believe that Bethesda had heeded the gaming community's feedback and chose not to anger it going forward. Unfortunately, it seems we were all wrong, and the studio's approach will presumably be to remove Denuvo months or even years after a game's release, once the initial hype has subsided and it's considered safer from the financial point of view to remove the DRM without risking piracy in the most important first few weeks after the launch.
Speaking of Denuvo, last week we discovered it in another highly anticipated release, Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Shadows, along with mandatory account linking and a EULA provision that permits the game to monitor your PC's RAM. You can read the full story by clicking this link.
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