Following the release of the Starfield pre-load yesterday, data miners have wasted no time in thoroughly examining the game files. Their findings have raised an intriguing question for PC gamers: based on the size of the exe file, it appears that the game will not be protected by Denuvo. The file size is a mere 90 MB, whereas all games with Denuvo protection typically have exe files weighing at least 300 MB or more. Additionally, no heavy DLL files, where Denuvo could potentially be found, have been detected, further confirming its absence.
This discovery is quite surprising considering that Bethesda has rarely released games in recent years without Denuvo protection. Almost all of their releases have utilized this Austrian protection, and they even added it to Ghostwire: Tokyo after a major patch, despite its initial lack of protection.
In theory, Bethesda could still add protection just before the game’s release. However, this scenario seems unlikely, as the company would surely prefer not to share an unprotected game EXE file, even in an encrypted pre-load.
Despite this, there are no mentions of Denuvo on the Steam page, and given the file size, it seems that Bethesda is confident in Starfield’s potential for excellent sales even without any protection. Perhaps the success of recent games like Baldur’s Gate 3, which sold millions of copies without any protection, has convinced the publisher to definitively abandon Denuvo in Starfield. Another possibility is that Bethesda wants to support the modding community, as some major mods require access to the game’s memory, which would be difficult with Denuvo present.
Source from www.playground.ru