On Steam and Bethesda's own launcher, Doom Eternal was released with the Denuvo DRM built in to thwart piracy; unfortunately for Bethesda, in the version of Doom Eternal released on its own launcher, the file DRM-free .exe was left behind; one Reddit poster found the file in a folder titled "original" and wrote, "Um guys - I think I "cracked" Doom Eternal [Serious]."

As far as cracks go, this one is as simple as can be." If you open the game's main folder, you will notice a 369 MB denuvo DOOMEternalx64vk.exe." BarryGettman wrote on Reddit. "However, under the .Doom Eternaloriginal is a smaller .exe with the same name and 67 MB. Copy this .exe to your main folder and overwrite the denuvo .exe."

Other users have confirmed that it works, and there is a screenshot of the folder with the small executable in the Resetera forum thread. Bethesda then updated the Bethesda.net version of the game to remove the DRM-free .exe, but it was too late: the unprotected .exe had already made its way into the piracy circuit. However, this is not just for piracy. Some players are worried that Denuvo's anti-piracy code will degrade the performance of the games they paid for.

This is actually not the first time this has happened with a Bethesda Launcher game. Rage 2" was also released last year as a DRM-free .exe. Some even speculated that this incident was an Easter egg on Bethesda's part, a way to troll pirates by uploading an executable file that would only function properly for the first few missions of the game. Some players have experienced crashes on the third level with a clean .exe, but this seems to be an unrelated driver issue.

Thanks, Ars Technica.