'It even breaks my heart a bit': Denuvo pushes back on its haters, says Steam forums are a 'very toxic, very hostile environment'
Not everyone thinks Denuvo DRM is a crime against PC gaming, but you'd probably struggle to find a PC gamer who says they like the anti-piracy software. And why should they? If it works properly, the only people who should notice the existence of Denuvo DRM are the software pirates trying to crack it. Everyone else is free to hate it—for perceived or real performance effects, or just because they don't like DRM—or have no feelings about it at all.
That's been the status quo for a long time, but Denuvo is finally pushing back on gamers who characterize it as the Lex Luthor of PC gaming, and says that not only should we not hate it, we should appreciate Denuvo DRM for the good it does for game developers.
«It even breaks my heart a bit to see how our solutions, especially the anti-piracy solution, are picked up by the community,» Denuvo product manager Andreas Ullmann told me earlier this year at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. «Because I think it's not fully understood the benefits that our solution can bring, because preventing piracy, you earn more through your game, which is then reinvested into making greater games. I don't have any proof for it, but probably, if our solution did not exist, maybe there are some great games that never get developed.»
I had been talking to Ullmann about a new security measure Denuvo is offering for pre-release game builds—interesting, but not very relevant to the typical PC gamer—and sorted the comment away in my mental file of interesting threads to follow up on. Alas, I moved too slowly: That comment foreshadowed a new effort by Denuvo to bring PC gamers over to its side, which kicked off with a Discord server last week (it didn't go well) and an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun this week, in which Ullmann expanded on his personal quest to improve Denuvo's rep.
In the RPS interview, Ullmann describes the Steam forums as a «very toxic, very hostile environment» and says that Denuvo no longer wants to let the
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