Denuvo wants to convince you its DRM isn’t “evil”

Simply mentioning the name "Denuvo" among some gamers is pretty much guaranteed to get you an instant, strong reaction. Just look at the comment threads underneath any Ars article covering Denuvo and you'll see plenty of complaints about the DRM-enhancing anti-piracy technology.

 

Irdeto, the company that acquired Denuvo in a 2018 purchase, doesn't generally make a habit of commenting at length on this reputation (or its secretive DRM schemes) in the public press. So when Irdeto Chief Operating Officer of Video Games Steeve Huin agreed to defend his company publicly in an exclusive interview with Ars Technica, I jumped at the chance to talk to him.

 

As it turns out, the people who make Denuvo are keenly aware of their image in the wider gaming world. "In the pirating/cracking community, we're seen as evil because we're helping DRM exist and we're ensuring people make money out of games," Huin told Ars.

 

But Huin stressed to Ars that he sees Denuvo as a positive force for the gaming community as a whole. "Anti-piracy technologies is to the benefit of the game publishers, [but also] is of benefit to the players in that it protects the [publisher's] investment and it means the publishers can then invest in the next game," he said. "But people typically don't think enough of that."

 

"Whether people want to believe it or not, we are all gamers, we love gaming, we love being part of it," he continued. "We develop technologies with the intent to make the industry better and stronger."

Trust but verify

Aside from generalized philosophical discussions over whether DRM should exist at all, by far the most substantive complaints about Denuvo's tech are about its alleged impact on game performance. Sometimes these accusations come from the crackers themselves and have to be weighed against strong denials from Denuvo and the game's developer. Other times, the accusations come from game makers, like outspoken Tekken 7 Director Katsuhiro Harada, who said in a 2018 tweet thread that the game's "anti-tamper third-party middleware" (i.e., Denuvo) was responsible for "frame rate drops" in the game.

 

In 2019, an Ars analysis comparing a Denuvo-free copy of Batman: Arkham Knight on the Epic Games Store to a Denuvo-laden copy from Steam found no difference in performance. But a series of analyses from YouTube channel Overlord Gaming in 2018 found significant performance differences in games measured directly before and after Denuvo protection was removed.

 

In our chat, Huin implied that this kind of public analysis was not very useful because "gamers [almost] never get access to the same version of [a game] protected and unprotected. There might be over the lifetime of the game 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."

 

Huin insisted that Irdeto puts 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."

 

After years of public uproar over Denuvo's alleged performance impact, though, Huin said he knows much of the gaming community won't take him at his word. "Our voice is unfortunately not sufficient to convince people because we're not trusted in their mind as a starting point in that debate," he said.

 

To get around that mistrust, Huin said Irdeto is working on a program that would provide two nearly identical versions of a game to trusted media outlets: one with Denuvo protection and one without. After that program rolls out, hopefully sometime in the next few months, Huin hopes independent benchmarks will allow the tech press to "see for yourself that the performance is comparable, identical... and that would provide something that would hopefully be trusted by the community."

Still going strong

Despite the very public performance concerns, major game publishers have continued to support Denuvo over the years for a very simple reason: It delays the release of piracy-enabling cracks—and sometimes stops them completely.

 

Shortly after Denuvo's initial rollout in 2014, the anti-tamper technology developed an "uncrackable" reputation that caused something of an existential crisis in the cracking community. And while Denuvo protection has proven somewhat more crackable in the years since, the modern version of Denuvo's anti-tamper tech has proven decently resilient to crackers' best efforts.

 

Of the 127 Denuvo-protected games released since 2020, only half have had their DRM protection successfully cracked, according to a list maintained by the Crackwatch subreddit (this includes some games that officially removed Denuvo after being cracked). And among the half that have been cracked, the median title received a full 175 days of effective DRM before a crack was released, according to that same list. That's a lot better than the "under a week" Denuvo cracking times that were making headlines in 2017 and means the vast majority of recent Denuvo-protected titles can't be effectively pirated in their first month of two of sales, "where the bulk of the money is made for a premium game after being made available," as Huin put it.

 

Huin said publishers license Denuvo technology "for a certain amount of time, [maybe] six months or a year," mainly to protect that initial sales period. After that, many publishers decline to renew that lease and instead release an updated version of the game that is not protected by Denuvo. CrackWatch lists 103 titles that released Denuvo-free versions well after launching with the DRM technology, many of which dropped the protection months after being cracked.

 

 

Huin wouldn't go into detail on the "magic" of Denuvo's anti-tamper technology beyond confirming that "obfuscation" is involved in "ensuring that reverse engineering is not possible." That said, Huin added that the company is "constantly advancing the technology, and when we see people coming close or being successful at some things, we continue to raise the bar."

 

And while crackers have proven persistent and inventive in untangling Denuvo's various obfuscation methods over the years, Huin said he feels that the company is a step or two ahead of the piracy community these days. "It's fair to say as well that we don't wait for a successful cheat or hack to start inventing the next time," Huin said. "We have a large amount of customers, many of the AAA [publishers] are our customers, and there are a lot of games released every year, so we have to be constantly evolving so we can help everyone. Waiting for a problem is usually not the best way of looking at things from a security perspective."

More than DRM

While the Denuvo name has become practically synonymous with its "anti-tamper" DRM technology, the company now hopes it can be just as well-known for its recent anti-cheating efforts. Denuvo's anti-cheat technology works on "some of the same principles" as its anti-tamper DRM, Huin said, but is aimed at maintaining code integrity at runtime rather than just when a game is loaded. "The core is the same, but the function of what they do is different," he said.

 

Because of this difference, Huin allowed that, unlike Denuvo's anti-tamper DRM, the anti-cheat product could have "a very low impact" on a game's performance. "Less than one percent is the metric we use for validating," he said.

 

Beyond confirming code integrity, in March, Denuvo announced a new "Unbotify" product that tries "to separate humans from non-humans playing in a game," as Huin put it. This involves monitoring player behavior to detect not just fully automated AI bots but also specialized controllers that can limit recoil, improve aim, or increase firing rates in many games.

Huin says that Denuvo will be "leaning more and more toward things like detecting and preventing cheating" going forward, a pivot he hopes will help the company's abysmal reputation among gamers. "When it comes to anti-cheat technologies, it's really a lot more for the players because you're there to make sure it's a fair and fun environment."

 

"We've seen the brand evolve more in the public domain than when it was just anti-piracy technologies," he continued. "What has changed a little bit, and I hope this is going to continue to change, is the broader public starting to see us less as a bad thing for the industry."

 

But even if Irdeto can conclusively and publicly prove Denuvo doesn't harm game performance, that reputational rejuvenation will probably remain a tall order.