Denuvo has earned quite a reputation in the gaming industry as the leading anti-piracy DRM software (digital rights management). However, it has often come under scrutiny and suspicion that the DRM actually hobbles the game’s optimization and performance. Thus, Denuvo doesn’t exactly have a positive standing in the gaming community. So when they opened up their own Discord and invited public communication to improve their image, what they got instead was a spicy discourse.
This happened during the middle of October 2024, when thousands of gamers immediately flooded Denuvo’s Discord channel to more or less bully the company. However, Denuvo’s representative recently had an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun and had a retort to their naysayers in Discord. From Andreas Ullmann himself (Denuvo Product Manager):
“So you just need to check out Steam forums, for example. Very toxic, very hostile environment. If a game announces to use any of our products, if you check out the Steam forums, all the claims are popping in. SSDs are destroyed by our solution.Â
The usual performance topics, and we simply don’t want to leave the floor to these people who are posting all things about us anymore. We want to also be there for a person who has not heard about us before. We also want to share our view, our opinion on these topics, and also act as a trusted source of information.
I can totally understand that there is a lot of bias if we are claiming something, because we often have the complete opposite view on something than the people we are debating with.
But you have to start somewhere, right? So this is now the start for this initiative, and we want to be out there. It will take some time. It will start on Discord, and later on we hope we can move over to other platforms: Reddit, Steam forums, to have official accounts and throw our comments into the discussions.”
Andreas Ullman also defended against the accusations about Denuvo’s perceived performance impact. He claims that testing and data for actual performance impact is difficult because there are too many legal hurdles. Some developers or studios apparently, aren’t open to public side-by-side comparisons about the effect of Denuvo on their games.
However, Ullman also isn’t denying that Denuvo negatively affects performance. He stated that Denuvo has an FAQ and that it mentions this impact. Ullman also retorts that when it comes to Denuvo’s performance impact, usually Tekken 7 only comes up which he implied was unfair since Denuvo covers around 60 to 70 games per year. Singling out what could be an isolated case might not be the best argument against Denuvo.
“Thing is, I think it’s important to understand how our solution works. And it’s also worth considering, because when these performance claims come up, it’s mostly this Tekken case that is referred to.
But considering that we are protecting 60 to 70 games every year, it’s quite interesting to see that there is only – if even – a handful of games where there was an effective performance impact cost. That’s really just a minority.”
In any case, Denuvo is here to stay and stay more transparent as is their most recent PR drive. It is worth noting that Denuvo’s immediate response to the overwhelming Discord criticism was to silence their gamer critics by putting the channel into read-only mode. Not exactly a smooth start in their crusade to improve their image.
