As if one layer of intrusive DRM wasn't enough, why not verify and sign a billion times for the DLC package, too?

There was a time where I'd have been angry but since I treat both DRM and micro-transaction-spam "Freemium" games in general like Ebola and actively avoid anything remotely connected with them, I'll let others 'enjoy' the "fruits" of its legacy...

Unfortunately since the vast majority of people these days just buy games from DRM stores the sales pretty much drown out the complaints. Need more people to demand DRM free content to the point that it can make a noticeable hit to product sales.

This is why I usually wait for ultimate bundles, I do not care for piecemeal content unless it's free. I've bought DLC in the past when it was decisively less insidious. Apologies to developers who rely on it to continue to support the game.

EDIT: I'm assuming this is to prevent people from buying the DLC once and then sharing it around? Weird, I kind of assumed DLC was already DRM'd in the first place, but maybe the assumption was you needed the base game to play it anyway.

I've said it before and I'll continue to say it for the foreseeable future, I love that Denuvo saves me money. So many games skipped because the developers decided to infect their products with this malware.

Well as DRM methods evolved so the piracy comunity. Aside from the so called "Scene" who straight up crack the whole package, or used to, now with the rise of DENUVO, the pirates put up new methods, they buy the base game and then use different tools or emulators to activate the DLCs without actually owning them. That was a response for the fact that DENUVO protected games are most of the time uncracked, but the focus was to protect the launch game and so the DLCs were not that heavily secured. I guess this is DENUVOs response to that.

I think this only applies to the Denuvo brand of DRM for DLC, as from what I have read many DLC have DRM.

If you were to go to the List of DRM-Free games at Steam or Epic for instance, you will see that while some base games are DRM-Free, there are cases where a DLC makes the game DRM, as do some updates.

We could imagine Denuvo execs doing their presentations to gaming software companies:

"So here we present our new solution for secutiry agaisnt piracy in games, now with downloadable content protection included! -show graphs-"

I was just thinking those days how Steam is becoming a behemoth of DRM software to any kind of software, not only games. Legacy software, legacy MMORPGs, old and new games. It's kinda scary when you think about this specific issue deeply, not only about games, but all kinds of software.

Kinda surprising that they didn't have something like this before. So people could previously pirate DLC and it would work on the steam version?

The only way to “remove drm”, or for a more complete term, give user control over the product, for an online only game like an mmo would be to release the server and client without drm or online need. That has absolutely nothing to do with steam.
Nor in fact is it a “behemoth of drm software”. A lot of titles have no drm, quite a few more have simple steam ceg drm. The point is it’s nothing to do with steam if publishers or developers laden their product with things like denuvo.

A question for you, do you use only the offline installers? What about galaxy? It’s just the whole thread seems to be about “isn’t denuvo bad”, but that is really just the tip of the iceberg, drm gets cracked all the time and generally only bothers paying customers. Online only, client driven, streamed, online gated etc. are far worse than drm.

Sigh, I wish all of these people who develop Digital Rights Management (DRM) copyright protections software would just use that money to develop their own video games and sell the video games.

Or use the money for something better, like donate the money to homeless people, but no instead they spend their money on developing more Digital Rights Management (DRM).

This is why I hate this planet. Our planet is garbage, no the human species is garbage.

Understandably, developers don't like cream.

Unfortunately they will get away with it since most people are fine with drm as you can see with Steam being huge and continues to grow. This goes for other things in general like consoles having drm more than ever now and windows 11 being the worst drm ever for an operating system requiring a MS account and Internet just to install the OS.

Not every one who uses Steam are fine with second layers of Digital Rights Management (DRM) being added to the video games that they purchase from Steam, some PC video gamers even ask for the video games to be sold on gog.com in their reviews on Steam.

DRM is evil. Lesser, greater, middling, it makes no difference. The degree is arbitrary, the definition blurred. If I am to choose between one evil or another I'd rather not choose at all.