Not everyone thinks Denuvo DRM is a crime against PC gaming, but you’d probably be hard-pressed to find a PC gamer who would say so like anti-piracy software. And why should they? If it works properly, the only people who should notice Denuvo DRM exist are software pirates trying to crack it. Everyone else may hate it – because they think it hurts performance, or simply because they don’t like DRM – or have no feelings about it at all.
This has been the status quo for a long time, but Denuvo is finally taking a stand against gamers who call him the Lex Luthor of video games and saying that not only should we not hate him, but we should appreciate Denuvo DRM for the good it brings to game developers.
“It even breaks my heart a little when I see how our solutions, especially anti-piracy solutions, are received by the community,” Denuvo product manager Andreas Ullmann told me earlier this year at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. “Because I think we don’t fully understand the benefits that our solution can bring, because by preventing piracy, you make more money from your game, which is then reinvested into making better games. I don’t have any proof of this, but probably if our solution doesn’t exist, maybe there are great games out there that will never be developed.
I talked to Father Ullmann new security measure Denuvo offers pre-release game compilations – interesting, but not particularly relevant to the typical PC gamer – and I filed away the comments in my mind containing interesting threads worth following. As it turns out, this comment was a preview of Denuvo’s new effort to attract PC gamers to its site, which began with the launch of a Discord server last week (it didn’t go well) and interview with Rock Paper Shotgun this week, where Ullmann talked about his personal quest to improve Denuvo’s reputation.
In an interview with RPS, Ullmann describes the Steam forums as “a very toxic, very hostile environment” and says Denuvo is no longer willing to allow a mob to post claims about its software unchecked. The company has been adamant that DRM does not negatively impact game performance, except in rare cases such as Tekken 7 where the problem was due to a bug. (Our results have lost significance due to age, but when Durante tested Final Fantasy 15’s performance with and without Denuvo DRM for us in 2018, we found no difference.)
On why Denuvo has such a negative reputation if it doesn’t hurt performance, Ullmann told RPS it’s partly because it “just works” and would-be pirates try to make it unattractive to game publishers by discrediting it.
“Pirates cannot play games that use our solution for an extended period of time, usually until the publisher decides to update our solution,” he said. “So there is a huge community, a lot of people on this planet who can’t play their favorite video games because they don’t want to pay for them, and therefore they have a lot of time to spend in communities and share their views and try to blame Denuvo for a lot of things — trying to persuade game publishers not to use our solutions so they can start playing pirated copies of games for free again.”
Another reason, Ullmann thinks, is that there’s no clear reason why gamers should like Denuvo: they only know that it’s a tool that huge publishers employ to combat piracy so they can make more money. But he claims that with today’s gigantic budgets, that means a 20 percent loss in launch revenue – which is what says a recent study Denuvo DRM protects – this is a significant failure.
In Interview with RPSUllmann also discusses why Denuvo hasn’t substantiated the performance claims with its own tests – the low answer is that it would need approval from its customers because no one would believe it anyway, and there’s already been some independent testing done (he pointed to ours as one examples include Final Fantasy’s own test 15).
As for why he wants to change perceptions about Denuvo now, Ullmann repeated what he told me in March: Beyond the obvious goal of attracting more customers, this is a personal matter.
“I’ve been with the company for so long,” Ullmann said. “The guys here are like my family because so many others here have been here for centuries too. It just hurts to see what is being published about us, even though it has been claimed hundreds of times that it is wrong.”
Currently, publishers using Denuvo often exploit them during the critical launch period and then remove them later via a patch. The upcoming Dragon Age: The Veilguard, somewhat surprisingly, won’t employ Denuvo at all, although EA says it won’t offer preloading as a result.
