It is well known that the community rejects the use of Denuvo. The anti-piracy system has earned the hatred of gamers for causing performance issues in titles; something that the technology’s creators vehemently deny. Now, the company is back with an interview trying to clean up its brand image, especially addressing the huge amount of criticism it receives from users.
More specifically, Andreas Ullmann, product manager at Denuvo, has granted an interview to the publication Rock Paper Shotgun. When asked about the terrible reputation of the anti-piracy system, the professional replied that this situation has been caused by two reasons: “First, our solution works. Pirates cannot play games that use our solution for long periods of time, usually until the publisher decides to patch our solution. So there is a large community, a lot of people on this planet who can’t play their favorite games because they are not willing to pay for them, and therefore have a lot of time to invest in communities, share their perspective, and try to blame Denuvo for many things – trying to make video game distributors not use our solutions so they can play pirate copies of games, again.”
“Second, I think it’s super difficult for a player. I am a player, and therefore I know what I’m talking about. I think it’s very difficult to see, as a player, what the immediate benefit is for me if a certain developer, distributor, is using our anti-piracy services,” continues Ullmann. “For anti-cheat, for example. It’s super easy. You, as a player, have the immediate benefit that if a game uses an anti-cheat solution, because it creates a fair environment in the game, you won’t have to deal with cheaters. However, it’s different.” Here, the manager recalls that, according to a recent study, skipping Denuvo results in a 20% loss in the first few weeks after the game’s release.
“It’s a big risk for them [the studios], so they are looking for something like insurance. They are looking for a way to minimize the risk of their investment [in development],” Ullmann continues. “Again, this doesn’t have an immediate effect for me as a player. But if you look further, the more successful a game is, the more updates it will receive over time. The more additional content that comes to that game, the more likely there will be a sequel. Basically, those are the benefits we offer to the average player.”
“No one will believe us, because here we are the bad guys”
From here, Rock Paper Shotgun points out that the criticisms of Denuvo are not just about piracy, but about the performance problems it causes in titles. A few days ago, Ullmann stated that cases like Tekken 7, Resident Evil Village, or Star Wars Jedi: Survivor were due to poor optimization by the developers. Nevertheless, the publication suggests the publication of official performance metrics and tests to clean up Denuvo’s image; something that the manager rejects for various reasons.
“Why don’t the developers make those comparisons and publish them? That’s something we can’t force them to do,” explains Ullmann in the conversation. “It seems like there are reasons why they don’t do it. Also, on the other side, probably considering the toxicity of the community (especially the pirate community), probably nobody would accept it because it could be manipulated. The second case is: we do it. We have the unprotected executables, usually, for the game. So we would have both [programs] available. We could make a direct comparison. But here are two problems. The first is that we need the approval of our client to do that with the game. It would be a public post using their franchise, their IP, so they would have to agree to that. And the other is: again, there will be comments that it’s manipulated. No one will believe us, because here we are the bad guys.”
“The third option is to trust a third party. I think that would be a way to do it,” the manager continues thinking about options like Digital Foundry. “Of course, we have the problem again. We can’t deliver unprotected executables to a third party, we probably won’t even get the approval of our client, as they are crucial data. So something like that would have to happen here in our office in Salzburg. But this is something we can definitely think about. Invite, I don’t know, Digital Foundry.”
Source | Mein-MMO
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