Well, when your DRM software is utter shit that it leads gamers to pirate games you're not going to have the best reputation.

Denuvo blames its low reputation on anyone who has experienced its product

Pirates & gamers

Lets blame 100% of the demographic we are fucking over. No wonder they get along so well with big devs.

denuvo execs are going on the list.

"Gamers"? Who else do they think is even going to encounter their shit? If the people that are forced to endure your shit aren't happy, seems like a you problem.

This is such BS. They claim there are challenges with testing whether or not Denuvo causes performance issues but aren't there 100s of games with Denuvo that have been cracked that clearly perform better than the legitimate versions? They talk about either the devs doing it or they themselves doing it but people don't want to publish the results. If the results are that there is no performance hit, then surely that's something everyone would want to show. It obviously does hit performance which is why they won't publish it.

They also say Denuvo helps developers save up to 20% of revenue that they would not have otherwise received due to piracy. How do they even know that? You can't compare two different games and you can't release the same game twice for people to buy twice. The fact that they also say "up to" suggests this is also bollocks!

So they have a great reputation with people who aren't gamers?

Uh huh. Speaking as someone who (stupidly) bought Star Wars Jedi Survivor at launch and expected a 12900KF and a 4090 to be able to play it stably -- the game ran like absolute shit until the patch where they announced they removed Denuvo. They'd done all manner of patching to that point which made absolutely no difference for the majority of people, but miraculously, when they removed Denuvo the performance across the board was exponentially higher. Traversal stutter is still there, but it's extremely minor and is aligned now with every other UE4 game's traversal stutter.

But yeah, I guess that was just a surprising coincidence that the performance issues almost entirely resolved themselves the moment Denuvo was removed, and that they didn't in the previous 8 patches.

Fuck Denuvo.

and Gamers

So the end-user for all the things their DRM is in.

Lmao it’s kinda hilarious, because all the positive PR in the world isn’t going to fix the fact that they’re a shit company with a shit product that only makes products it’s used on worse. Do as much investor spin as you want - that fact will never change, and you’ll still be hated.

So basically their whole thing boils down to "The people who don't like us are the people we're trying to stop anyway, and everyone else is just wrong when they don't like us." When challenged on things like performance impacts they insist that they can't provide metrics, because it would be difficult to get permission, and even if they did nobody would believe them anyway. Any time a third party provides those metrics, though, those are lies because those third parties are all pirates. So again, everyone who doesn't like Denuvo is actually just wrong, at least according to Denuvo.

This effort at defending themselves is just so hilariously bad. Not only did they utterly fail to make themselves look any better in any way, the absolute shallowness of their answers makes them look so much worse.

Fuck Denuvo, absolute bunch of clowns, the lot of them.

"It's the pirates' fault because they prove we're full of shit"

Ullman's argumentation is very wiggly when it comes to impact on performance. On one hand, he claims there's very little proof, on the other hand he claims there is no point producing proof because they wouldn't be believed. Furthermore he says their hands are tied as they'd need their client's approval to publish such numbers, conveniently ignoring the possibility of anonymizing and grouping data. Remember they state to being included in 70-80 games yearly.

Finally, and this is an old song, but anyways: preventing loss in sales due to piracy is an exercise in wishful thinking. The amount of pirate players who would have paid in an alternate universe with no cracked version can't be reliably estimated.

Stupid fuckin gamers and their "standards" and all of their complaining about "poor performance" because we're basically requiring they run the game in a virtual machine that constantly stops to check if it's pirated

Oh? Does this mean they are finally starting to actually lose business because of how shitty the product is?

They wouldn't be whining about being hated if it didn't impact their bottom line...

Ah yes definitely not because their shit software hinders performance

This would be great job if it weren’t for all the people vibes

I mean, they are right.
Just not in the way they think.

I'm not well versed in how Denuvo works, only in how it tanks performance. Does anyone know if there is anything stopping Denuvo from checking purchase validity the first time, and on subsequent game launches it can access a secure folder with a file like an internet cookie saying "yeah, this game was bought legit at one point, let it run" and then not run alongside the game?

These things are like door locks. The point is to make it harder to pirate than to pay. This doesn’t mean people won’t pirate. Just like a door lock doesn’t mean people won’t burgle.

If it took a long time to open the door because the lock is too complex, it is the lock maker’s fault not the burglar’s fault. The solution is to buy a new lock.

That’s funny bc it seems their entire job is to steal data and slow down game cracks by a small amount.

Imagine stating you are unable to get third parties to agree to release metrics on game performance, then turning around and saying that when third parties give metrics that they're wrong.

I didn't know they hired Principal Skinner...