Denuvo's had enough - seeks to finally prove its DRM anti-piracy tech doesn’t hurt game performance

Irdeto, the company behind Denuvo Anti-Tamper, an anti-piracy DRM that's very popular with publishers, has an image problem with gamers. The DRM is infamous practically anywhere you look, with its inclusion in hotly-anticipated games often inviting the ire of many of those excited about them.

The history of the belief that Denuvo DRM makes games run worse is long and complicated. Before and after tests have been done on many occasions to prove there may indeed be a performance hit, but the specifics of each case are different. Sometimes, a publisher's own DRM (used alongside Denuvo) is to blame, as we've seen with Resident Evil Village.

But Irdeto is sick of it, and the company wants independent reviewers to prove that its DRM does not hurt game performance. In an interview with Ars Technica, Irdeto's CEO of video games, Steve Huin, said that the sort of tests gamers often bring up don't always compare the same version of the game with and without Denuvo.

"Gamers [almost] never get access to the same version of [a game] protected and unprotected," he explained. "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 added that Irdeto does before-and-after tests internally to verify whether a hit to performance exists, but he's well aware that the public won't believe any of that, if it decides to share these reports. Instead, he believes a better solution is to allow third-parties to test and publish the results on their own.

The CEO revealed that Irdeto is currently working on a programme that would provide copies of games with and without Denuvo to trusted press and media for testing purposes, in the hopes that their independent reports would show that "the performance is comparable, identical... and that would provide something that would hopefully be trusted by the community."

This should arrive in the next few months, according to Huin.

Outside of the discussion around game performance, DRM is seen as anti-consumer by a large portion of players. A problem with Denuvo's authentication servers rendered multiple games unplayable in 2021. Games with DRM tend to also be much harder to preserve for future generations, such as the case with several Games for Windows Live games whose publishers never invested in switching off that DRM to something that could make them playable today.