Denuvo is claiming that its Digital Rights Management (DRM) software does not have any performance impact in games that utilize it, according to a report by Ars Technica. Steeve Huin, the COO of video games for Irdeto, which owns Denuvo, told Ars that it is well aware of its reputation in the gaming world, but assures gamers that development time is taken to ensure game performance is not impacted in titles that support its DRM.
Denuvo is a very popular DRM among publishers, with a huge amount of success in recent years preventing pirates and gamers from tampering with supported titles. However, that hasn’t stopped the gaming community from hating on it. Denuvo has garnered an incredibly bad reputation in the gaming community for handicapping gaming performance and breaking mods.
However, Huin claims that the performance-hindering claims from players couldn’t be further from the truth. Huin explained that gamers almost never get access to a game build that comes in both protected and non-protected formats. Often, developers will remove Denuvo (more on that later) months or years down the road, after the game has received a boatload of bug fixes and optimizations that make the game run better. As a result, gamers will compare an early version of a game featuring Denuvo DRM, against the same game later on without it, without taking into consideration any other changes.
Huin claims that the Denuvo team puts in the effort of applying security and validating game performance to ensure Denuvo does not handicap performance in any way. He suggested that Denuvo is a positive force in the gaming community as a whole, noting how anti-piracy technologies benefit players, and protect publishers’ investments.
However, he knows that the gaming community won’t take him or the team behind Denuvo seriously even if the performance claims are real. As a result, Huin says that Irdeto (the company that bought Denuvo) is now working on a program that will give trusted media outlets a chance to test the game with and without the Denuvo DRM. Huin hopes that this plan will successfully crush false claims made on Denuvo and renew its reputation.
It’s worth checking out the full interview to learn more about how Denuvo hopes to clear it’s name and, somehow, improve its reputation.
