Denuvo Wants to Prove to PC Gamers Its DRM Doesn’t Affect Performance

wccftech.com:

Salzburg-based software company Denuvo first launched its anti-tamper DRM (digital rights management software) in 2014. Most game developers and publishers quickly chose to adopt Denuvo in an effort to protect launch sales with its hard-to-crack software.

However, its application led to several controversies. In some games like Tekken 7 and Sonic Mania Plus, the implementation of Denuvo weighed heavily on the CPU, leading to worse performance than versions of these games without the DRM. In other cases, like Final Fantasy XV: Windows Edition, thorough testing exonerated Denuvo from causing any performance degradation.

The debate rages on to this very day, making most PC gamers very happy whenever a developer chooses to drop the DRM from its game. CAPCOM, for example, has a habit of doing that one to two years after launch, as we've witnessed with Devil May Cry 5 and Resident Evil Village.

However, Denuvo hasn't resigned to the idea of being the scapegoat of any poor PC port. In an interview published a couple of days ago on Ars Technica, Steeve Huin (COO of Videogames at Irdeto, the company that acquired Denuvo in 2018) defended publically the anti-tamper DRM.

Gamers almost never get access to the same version of a game protected and unprotected. Over the game's lifetime, there might be a protected and unprotected version, but these are not comparable because these are different builds over six months, many bug fixes, etc., which could make it better or worse. We put in the effort of applying the security and validating that the performance is as it was and is not impacted... In the case of anti-tamper, I think there is a clear statement that there is no perceptible impact on gameplay because of the way we do things.

Huin