Electronic Arts has pushed a new update for Tales of Kenzera: ZAU that removed the Denuvo anti-tamper tech from it. Tales of Kenzera: ZAU came out on PC in April 2024. In other words, it took four months for the publisher to remove it. GG EA.
Tales of Kenzera: ZAU is a metroidvania-style adventure game from Surgent Studios. The game features 2.5D graphics and vibrant environments filled with lots of colors.
Although its Overall Reviews are Very Positive, its recent ones are Mixed. Still, the good news here is that its PC demo is still available for download. As such, you can download it and see for yourselves whether it’s something that interests you.
To be honest, I’m surprised by the removal of Denuvo in less than five/six months. Usually, it takes that long for most publishers to remove it. So, I guess the game has not been selling well?
Anyway, this is good news and may give us a hint at what will happen with Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Right now, EA has not listed Denuvo for it on its Steam store page. So, my guess is that it won’t be using it. I’m saying this because Madden NFL 25’s Steam page does list Denuvo.
As I’ve said, other companies have also removed Denuvo from several of their games. In March 2023, KRAFTON removed Denuvo from The Callisto Protocol. NEOWIZ has also removed it from its Souls-like game, Lies of P.
And that’s not all. Bethesda’s Wolfenstein Youngblood, Ghostwire: Tokyo and Doom Eternal no longer have it. Warner Bros has also removed it from Mortal Kombat 11. Then we have Bandai Namco who has removed it from Tekken 7 and NARUTO TO BORUTO: SHINOBI STRIKER.
Another company that has removed Denuvo from a lot of its PC titles is Square Enix. The Japanese team has removed it from games like The Diofield Chronicle, VALKYRIE ELYSIUM, TRIANGLE STRATEGY, LIVE A LIVE and Forspoken. Moreover, both Octopath Traveler and its sequel no longer use it. And, earlier this month, SE also removed Denuvo from Star Ocean The Second Story R.
All in all, this is great news for PC gamers. Or at least for those who were interested in Tales of Kenzera: ZAU. From what I can see on SteamDB, its peak number of concurrent gamers was 287. And in the last 24 hours, it had 14 concurrent players. So, the game did not sell that well.
Stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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DIE detected doing gods work.
at this point it cannot be denied.
Could have been something interesting but over the years I've realized that platformers and metroidvanias are not my favorite games. Hope those who bought it enjoyed it though.
You just scratched off 80% of indie games.
lol maybe, I still find some cool ones to play like anger foot or balatro
Metroidvania's are to the late 2010s early 2020s what challenge platforms were for the 2000s through early 2010s.
Still trying to figure… If piracy harm the sales, why aren't DENUVO games cheaper?
best thing about denuvo was proving that piracy has zero effect on game sales, if you want the game you buy it, if you dont want the game, you play something else, pirates dont buy games.
It just proves that the majority of pirates come from struggling economies where they can't afford games anyway.
and their price the games 70 which is like asking 500 for a game in those regions.
The thing is: this fact was proved long ago!
As you put it, pirates won't buy games, period! It doesn't matter the price, if people aren't willing to buy, they simply won't.
Cause piracy doesn't hurt sales, whoever was going to buy the game will buy it day one or later during discounts anyway.
Plus there never been data that corrobates that piracy hurts sales, the opposite is quite true in fact, some developers have used piracy as an advertisement tool.
Yep, there were a lot of such examples in the past where piracy actually helped to make a product more popular.
And that baffles me even more… Why dafuq devs are willing to pay for these solutions if it serves no pourpose?!
Fvcking strange world we live in.
the fact they did that means that denuvo has a subscription fee and this game aint selling enough to justify this.
EA, for gods sake, remove DENUVO from GRID Legends!!!
Still has Steam DRM according to PCgamingWiki.
DRM-free on Epic.
Talk about a waste of money for both parties
and then you got sega that will not remove it from any game.