Summary
There are few things that can really rile up PC players these days more than Denuvo DRM. Almost every single time a studio announces its title will include anti-piracy measures by Denuvo, thousands of gamers put their heads in their hands, while thousands morekick up a backlash so fiercethat some developers haveremoved Denuvo from their games.
A lot of the reasons behind the hatred of Denuvo DRM is due to performance issues that the service has caused in many games in the past.Resident Evil VillageandSonic Originsare two fairly high-profile examples of games that were rough on PC, with fans pointing to Denuvo as the cause. It’s caused the company’s reputation to completely plummet over the past few years, but Denuvo itself reckons there’s another reason why gamers hate it so much.
Denuvo Is Fed Up With “Toxicity” Surrounding Its Reputation
Over the past week, Denuvo went on a fairly disastrous PR campaign to try and clean up its image, which ended with the companyhaving to make changes to a Discord serverdue to the sheer amount of abuse it was flooded with. Denuvo product manager, Andreas Ullmann, then sorted outan interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, in which they claimed that the actual reason the company is hated so much is that Denuvo “simply works.”
“First, our solution simply works,” says Ullman. “Pirates cannot play games which are using our solution over quite long time periods, usually until the publisher decides to patch out our solution. So there is a huge community, a lot of people on this planet who are not able to play their favorite video games, because they are not willing to pay for them, and therefore, they have a lot of time to spend in communities and share their views and try to blame Denuvo for a lot of things.”
Rock, Paper, Shotgun then asks exactly why Denuvo felt it was necessary to come out and attempt to make its image seem better when plenty of studios use them regardless, and Ullman claims it’s probably because it “hurts to see what’s posted out there”. Ullman also says that it may be damaging from a business point of view to remain silent, claiming some developers may “fear the hate and the toxicity of the community” if they openly use them.
Those are some pretty bold claims, especially the one in which Ullman suggests people hate Denuvo en masse because it’s too successful at stopping piracy. There’s a reason why so many peopleare thrilled when a game doesn’t include Denuvo, and it’s doubtful that everyone cheering is just happy they’ll have an easier time pirating a game.
