Sega just ensured that I won't be playing Sonic Origins
Sonic Origins, a remaster of four classic Sonic games, will be released on June 23 across all platforms, but Sega's choice to include the controversial Devuvo DRM for the PC version of the game is likely to rustle some feathers.
For those who are unaware, Denuvo is an anti-piracy digital rights management (DRM) solution for game developers that can be integrated into PC games in order to make it more difficult to copy and then redistribute them. This isn't something that's downloaded in addition to games, but rather included within the game code itself, which makes removing it from your system almost impossible.
It's natural that game developers would want to avoid piracy, but gamers have expressed concerns over the DRM's impact on performance. A YouTuber called Overlord Gaming even has a series documenting performance benchmarks with and without Denuvo, created by taking advantage of situations where developers have willingly removed it from game files.
One such video comparing titles such as Death Stranding and the Resident Evil 2 remake notes that screen-loading times and frame rates were affected consistently. There's a lot of data to sift through, but the main menu for Death Stranding took 35 seconds with Denuvo, versus just 16 seconds when the DRM had been removed. The numbers may be low, but that's still an increase of almost 55%.
Denuvo claims that its website that the DRM has no negative impact on game performance, stating «Since only performance non-critical game functions are used in the Anti-Tamper process, Anti-Tamper has no perceptible effect on game performance nor is Anti-Tamper to blame for any game crashes of genuine executables.»
Still, many gamers are wary when they see the Denuvo name appearing alongside
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