The Irdeto-owned company, which develops both anti-cheat and DRM (or, as they call it, anti-tamper) technologies, has made an announcement that no reasonable person can take seriously.

Ars Technica interviewed Steve Huin, the Denuvo director responsible for games, who said that “there is no perceptible impact on gameplay because of the way we do things,” which has been proven many times that Denuvo does have an impact on gameplay (Injustice 2, RiME… shall we list?). According to him, comparisons comparing a Denuvo-laden version to a cracked version are inaccurate because they are rarely based on the same version of the game (meanwhile, he seems to ignore that these games START faster and the experience seems more stable!).

“There might be over the lifetime of the game a protected and unprotected version, but these are not comparable because these are different builds over six months, many bug fixes, etc., which could make it better or worse. Unfortunately, our voice is insufficient to convince people because we’re not trusted as a starting point in that debate,” says Huin, who revealed that Irdeto has an idea. The company wants to launch a program in a few months that will allow the press to benchmark the game with and without Denuvo, and Huin says we’ll get similar performance with both versions.

In the past, several games didn’t run on Intel’s Alder Lake processors because of Denuvo. There was even a weekend where, for example, Guardians of the Galaxy and Persona 4 Golden were unplayable because Denuvo’s servers (which is where the copy protection “calls home”; interesting, isn’t it now called anti-temper?) failed. These cases prove that DRM is indeed harmful. If a game still carries it 5-6 years after its release (and disappears from Steam while still having it; see F1 post-2016), that is rather pathetic.

From decades of experience, there used to be horrible copy protection (e.g., Starforce), and now, we have to crack games that use it to make it work, even though we have the game disc on our shelf. Why does Denuvo need kernel-level access…?

Source: PCGamer