How valuable is a digital rights management (DRM) piracy protection scheme after it has been cracked? The obvious answer is "not at all," an answer that seems to have been confirmed by the removal of Denuvo protection from two popular games, both of which saw that DRM scheme fail earlier this year.

DSOGaming reports that the 2016 reboot of Doom no longer has Denuvo protection built-in as of an update that went live earlier this week. The move follows a similar pattern to that of Playdead's Inside, which removed Denuvo protection last month. Inside's DRM protection was cracked in August.

Playdead, Bethesda, and Denuvo have yet to respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica on the matter, but there is significant speculation and discussion (including from one purported Denuvo-associated developer on Reddit) that Denuvo's contracts include a refund clause if the protection is cracked within a certain time period. Doom was cracked roughly four months after its release, while Inside was available for only six weeks before its protection was broken.

For about two years, Denuvo provided best-in-class, seemingly unbreakable copy protection for the handful of video games that could afford to employ the company's reportedly expensive services. But the first cracks in that previously impenetrable armor began to appear in August with a Doom crack that fooled the computer into thinking it was running a legitimate free demo of the game.

While the method for cracking Denuvo protection is time- and effort-intensive and it can't be directly generalized from one game to another, the cracking community has managed to successfully break Denuvo's hold on games including Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst, and Rise of the Tomb Raider. If any of those titles suddenly remove their Denuvo protection entirely in the near future, it will lend some support to the theory that these cracks are activating refund clauses that could impact Denuvo's bottom line.