Denuvo’s product manager says that steam is a toxic, hostile environment. Have you heard of the theory of the counter-effect?
Denuvo has been destroying PC game protection for a decade. It’s not that AAA games can’t be accessed in warez form from day one, it’s that publishers fail to remove DRM from games more than once, thus removing them from Steam a few years later (Codemasters and Electronic Arts F1 games are good examples…). The problem with this is that it makes these games unplayable in the future if the Irdeto servers that own Denuvo go down. So you could call them unpreservable titles.
Andreas Ullmann, who spoke to PCGamer at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, disagrees: “It actually breaks my heart a little bit to see how our solutions, especially the anti-piracy solution, are being embraced by the community, because I don’t think they fully understand the benefits that our solution can bring, because by preventing piracy, you earn more from your game, which is then reinvested into making bigger games. I don’t have any proof for this, but probably, if our solution doesn’t exist, there might be some great games that never get made. Then it might have been appropriate to give some examples.
Denuvo had a Discord server that received similar negative feedback, and they shut it down. Ullmann has already spoken to Rock, Paper, Shotgun about this. According to him, Steam forums are a very negative and toxic environment, and Denuvo says that DRM does not affect game performance, and if it does, it’s because of a bug.
“Pirates cannot play games that use our solution for quite a long time, usually until the publisher decides to patch our solution. So there is a huge community, a lot of people on this planet who are not able to play their favorite video games because they are not willing to pay for them, and so they spend a lot of time in communities sharing their views and trying to blame Denuvo for a lot of things – trying to get game publishers to stop using our solutions so they can start playing pirated games for free again. I’ve been with the company for so long. The guys here are like my family because a lot of the other guys here have been here forever. It just hurts to see what’s out there about us, even though it’s been proven wrong hundreds of times,” Ullmann added.
Electronic Arts made a surprising move: Dragon Age: The Veilguard will NOT use Denuvo. This is an example that many could follow. Denuvo’s predecessor, SecuROM, was no good, and that technology has since disappeared…
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