Metro Exodus, the latest and third entry into the Metro Series, has been released out into the market last February and has gotten two expansions as well. Metro Exodus deviates from being a linear shooter set in the narrow confines of the Moscow metro system and takes the player above ground into small open-world maps along with dashing in several RPG and survival elements. The game was overall well-received, getting praise for its evolution in genres while still keeping the horror atmosphere which is a staple of the older games.
Being over a year old and having gone far past the peaks of demand for the game, 4A Games has released another patch that has removed Denuvo. Denuvo is a digital rights management software that is supposed to deter pirates from acquiring the game for free. Most developers and publishers launch their games with some form of anti-piracy protection such as Denuvo although it is not perfect. Most anti-piracy software is intended to stop pirates for the first couple of months during its launch as that is when sales are the highest.
While being popular, Denuvo has had mixed anti-piracy results with sometimes Denuvo being cracked within the first week or in a few cases the first day of launch itself. It is unclear if and to what degree anti-piracy software prevents cases of piracy, but a lot of gamers have complained about anti-piracy software and Denuvo specifically. People have claimed that Denuvo often hinders a game’s performance with FPS or eats too much upstream data to play online effectively.
It is becoming normal for a game to launch with Denuvo or another digital rights management software at first and then remove it later down the line when sales are slowing down. Along with removing Denuvo, the latest patch has fixed several bugs with Sam’s Story the last expansion for Metro Exodus.