If there's one thing that prompts firey discussion in the PC gaming community, it's Denuvo. The storied anti-tamper software has consistently been accused of tanking players' performance, even if we're still light on verifiable data to back these claims up. I the Resident Evil Village debate back in the day, and I also the celebratory comments that flooded our Facebook post confirming that Capcom had eventually removed it. A quick glance at any forum post on Denuvo is pretty harrowing, but product manager Andreas Ullmann is determined to put a stop to it.
In recent weeks, Denuvo has attempted to improve its public image, appointing Ullmann as product manager and opening its own Discord server (which was quickly shuttered following a tsunami of "inappropriate content"). All of this is in an attempt to "give [players] a platform to express [their] queries and receive the answers [they] have deserved all along."
Following the Discord's closure, Ullmann spoke to RPS to say that the team is sick of letting "toxicity" slide while also responding to an earlier comment claiming Denuvo "will stop letting every claim about our product go unanswered."
"It's basically really about the stuff that's posted by the community," he states. "You just need to check out Steam forums, for example. Very toxic, very hostile environment." He claims if ever a game announces its inclusion of Denuvo products, players are quick to flag concerns about the software's supposed performance impact. "We simply don't want to leave the floor to these people who are posting all things anymore."
On the now-shuttered Discord, an FAQ page (screenshotted by tech4gamers) rejected claims that Denuvo causes performance issues, directly addressing the Resident Evil Village and Tekken 7 controversies.
"Tekken 7 experienced an issue where the wrong source code part was selected for protection. Specifically, it was triggered by certain moves by certain characters, leading to in-game stuttering," the response reads.
"Resident Evil Village included additional protection measures that were unrelated to Denuvo Anti-Tamper, which caused a performance impact once the game was cracked, this protection was removed, which led to faster execution times."
Denuvo itself appears to take no blame for these issues, then, and when asked why the software has such a poor reputation, Ullmann claims it's because "our solution simply works. Pirates cannot play games which are using our solution over quite long time periods, usually until the publisher decides to patch out our solution," he says.
Ullmann claims there is a "huge community" of players who are not willing to part with the cash to play the games they want to, and "therefore they have a lot of time to spend in communities and share their view and try to blame Denuvo."
He goes on to note that a study in the Entertainment Computing journal (Volume 52) claims that piracy results in a 20% loss of revenue for videogame makers and that the results suggest Denuvo products "protect legitimate sales to an estimated mean of 15 percent of total revenue and median of 20 percent."
Ullmann claims that players see this and respond "'Okay, then these big corporations are just making even more money.' But in the end, it's not that easy."
The journal also notes that "there is little justification to employ Denuvo long-term (i.e. for more than three months), especially given that Denuvo can have negative technical side effects and is generally disliked by s."
Denuvo's dedicated Discord is still unavailable as of the time of writing, with a Thursday, October 17 post on X (formerly Twitter) claiming that the team is "implementing over the next few days."
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