Denuvo’s had enough – seeks to finally prove its DRM anti-piracy tech doesn’t hurt game performance

Irdeto, the company behind Denuvo Tamper, an anti-piracy DRM that is very popular among publishers, has an image problem with gamers. DRM is infamous pretty much everywhere you look, with its inclusion in highly anticipated games often drawing the ire of many who are enthusiastic about them.

The history of the belief that Denuvo DRM makes games run worse is long and complicated. Before and after tests have been done many times to show that there may indeed be a performance impact, but the details of each case are different. Sometimes a publisher’s DRM (used in conjunction with Denuvo) is to blame, as we’ve seen with Resident Evil Village.

But Irdeto is fed up with it, and the company wants independent reviewers to prove that its DRM doesn’t affect game performance. In an interview with Ars TechnicaIrdeto’s CEO of video games, Steve Huin, said that the kind of tests that gamers usually do don’t always compare the same version of the game with and without Denuvo.

“Players [almost] Never get access to the same version of [a game] checked and unchecked,” he explained. “There might be a checked and unchecked version for the life of the game, but these are not comparable because they are different versions for six months, lots of bug fixes, etc., which could make it better. or worse.”

Huin added that Irdeto performs before-and-after testing internally to see if there is a performance impact, but he is well aware that the public will not believe any of that, if he chooses to share these reports. Instead, he believes that a better solution is to allow third parties to test and publish the results on their own.

The CEO revealed that Irdeto is currently working on a program that would provide copies of games with and without Denuvo to the press and trusted media for testing purposes, in the hope that their independent reports will show that “performance is comparable, identical …and that would provide something that the community would hopefully trust.”

This should arrive in the next few months, according to Huin.

Outside of the game performance discussion, a large section of gamers consider DRM to be anti-consumer. An issue with Denuvo’s authentication servers made several games unplayable in 2021. Games with DRM also tend to be much more difficult to preserve for future generations, as is the case with several Games for Windows Live games whose publishers never invested in changing that DRM to something that could make them playable today.