Denuvo Responds to Why Players Hate Anti-Piracy Protection and How It Affects Performance
Today, 11:40
Andreas Ullmann, a product manager at Denuvo, gave an in-depth interview to Rock Paper Shotgun, addressing why gamers often see the anti-piracy software in a negative light.
According to Ullmann, the first reason is due to pirates who don't want to pay for games and therefore criticize the protection.
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.
Ullmann also mentioned that Denuvo helps increase revenue, which can be used for further game development.
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.
When asked about Denuvo's potential negative impact on game performance, Ullmann confirmed that such cases exist, but they are rare and usually occur due to incorrect implementation by developers. He also stated that cracked versions can't run better because of several technical factors.
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.
