Highlights
- Payday 3 will use the unpopular anti-tamper technology, Denuvo, along with the developer's own activation service, potentially causing inconvenience for players.
- The game's always-online requirement may deter single-player fans, as they won't be able to access content if the internet connection goes down.
- Despite the game being always online, the inclusion of Denuvo shows that developers are investing heavily to prevent piracy, although its effectiveness in this case is questionable.
Deep Silver and Starbreeze have confirmed that Payday 3 will use Denuvo, one of the least popular anti-tamper technologies in all of gaming, on top of the developer's own Starbreeze Nebula activation service. This means that players may end up needing to contend with several concurrent security services while playing the game, signalling a potentially less-than-ideal situation for the game's late September release.
This, of course, builds on top of the previous news that some single-player fans may wish to avoid Payday 3 due to its always-online requirement. Even though the game should technically provide players with a way to heist solo, there will be no way to engage with content should the Internet go down, which puts it firmly into the territory of dedicated live-service titles such as Destiny 2 and Diablo 4 in that respect.
With both Starbreeze Nebula and the aforementioned always-online requirement in place, it may sound a bit strange that Starbreeze and Deep Silver have also chosen to implement Denuvo into Payday 3. The infamous DRM has proliferated in the gaming industry over the past several years due to its ability to hold off piracy for months at a time in some cases. So, Denuvo's appeal is readily apparent from a corporate viewpoint, but the fact that the game is always online means that pirates will be hard-pressed to make cracked versions of Payday 3 work anyway.
Denuvo recently released an ebook about piracy, where the company railed against not only PC bootlegging but also emulation, which was likened to an "economic threat" for game developers, as well as a problem that will lead to reputation loss and IP rights violations. Granted, it's not difficult to see why Denuvo would lean heavily into the idea that piracy is a huge issue for the gaming industry, and the company's broader argument seems to have worked on Starbreeze and Deep Silver.
What this means is that devs will spend a lot on Denuvo just to keep pirates away from Payday 3 for as long as possible. It's impossible to say whether there's any economic merit in that approach for an always-online title, but Payday 3 will be coming out in September, and its early launch performance should give fans an inclination of how successful it ends up being in the end.
It's a given that Payday 3 will improve upon Payday 2 in many different ways, but the community may need to contend with downgrades in some respects, too. Payday 2 ended up developing a fairly extensive modding community years after it first came out, for example, and it's unlikely that the same could happen with an always-online title. Payday 3's release should make for an interesting event, then, especially for long-time fans of the franchise.
Payday 3 releases on September 21 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
