Doom may be Eternal, but so is the relent able state of the gaming industry. Plagued with greed and incompetence, it is one of the few on Earth that can commit outright fraud in failing to disclose the existence of Denuvo in their terms of sales, deliver an inferior product to consumers, and still get away with it. In most other industries this behavior is a quick way to land yourself in prison or a legal nightmare.

Doom Eternal’s release has been plagued with an innumerable amount of issues. Causing Bethesda’s customer support forums to be inundated at launch with 132 pages of people having issues with getting the game to work. Aside from random crashes, many users find the game will outright not boot, or that their anti-virus identifies the executable as malicious and quarantines it. Certainly, not every issue can be laid at the feet of Denuvo, but a good chunk of these issues unmistakably stem from the bloated anti-piracy measure’s inclusion.

An inclusion that now appears to have been entirely pointless as a normal executable was discovered inside the games Bethesda.net files. From day 0 as a result of players unlocking their game early the game was effectively cracked. Since then Bethesda has removed the executable, but not before every pirate group was able to get their hands on it.

Said executable is easily usable without any recoding or tampering with the game files, but some outlets have falsely reported there are zero issues with its use. Though there are some that report having zero issues, many have reported the game will not load or will crash in chapter 3. Others have pointed out that updating your graphic drives appears to remedy the situation, but this solution has not worked for everyone.

With Rage 2 launching with an untouched executable in the files it raises the question whether this was truly accidental or intentional. Bethesda’s Make Work (women and minority) Tax Credit hiring practices have not flooded the company with the best and most capable employees, but after the first instance policies should have been put in place to prevent this from occurring again. Alternative to the inclusion being intentional is the notion that Bethesda is wracked by incompetence from top-down.

Given the passion the developers have shown leading up to Doom Eternal’s release I personally lean more toward the inclusion being intentional and left undiscovered. Yet there is no way to prove that without the responsible party being caught or coming forward.