Denuvo Responds to Why Players Hate Anti-Piracy Protection and How It Affects Performance

I think two main reasons. First, our solution simply works. Pirates cannot play games which are using our solution over quite long time periods, usually until the publisher decides to patch out 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 therefore they have a lot of time to spend in communities and share their view and try to blame Denuvo for a lot of things — trying to make the gaming publishers to not use our solutions so they can start playing pirate copies of games for free again.

Secondly, I think it's super hard for a gamer. I'm a gamer myself, and therefore I know what I'm talking about. I think it's super hard to see, as a gamer, what is the immediate benefit for me that a certain game developer, game publisher, is using our anti-piracy services. For anti-cheat, for example. It's super easy. You as a player have an immediate benefit if a game uses an anti-cheat solution, because it's a fair environment in the game, and you don't need to face cheaters. It's different, though. There was a recent study about the financial impact of our protection. That study said our solution saves our customers around 20% of — or an additional 20% of revenue — if they're using our solution.

If I, as a gamer, would read that, I see: okay, then these big corporations are just making even more money. But in the end, it's not that easy. Especially currently, the gaming industry is going through a very tough time. Budgets for AAA games are in the hundreds of millions. The publishers and developers, they have to afford that upfront, and they need to get the money back within the first few weeks after release.

The cracks, they don't remove our protection. The cracks still have all our code in and all our code is executed. There is even more code on top of the cracked code — that is executing on top of our code, and causing even more stuff to be executed. So there is technically no way that the cracked version is faster than the uncracked version. That's simply a technical fact.