Denuvo respond to their rep for tanking games - "I'm a gamer myself, and therefore I know what I'm talking about"

Over the past week or so, you may have caught wind of Denuvo - the makers of anti-cheat and anti-piracy software - embarking on a PR campaign of sorts, intended to combat negative public perception of their software. In case you're unfamiliar, Denuvo's wares have become infamous for allegedly sabotaging the performance of all sorts of video games, from Resident Evil: Village to Tekken 7, though accounts of the severity vary, and there is an on-going shortage of independently supplied raw data.

Denuvo's attempts to clear the air include opening a Discord, which they say “ is a key step in fostering closer relationships with game developers, publishers, and players, offering a dynamic, real-time platform for meaningful interaction”. On Monday, Denuvo’s media team reached out to me to offer an interview with Denuvo’s product manager, Andreas Ullmann. Here’s that interview, edited for brevity.

RPS: In a recent public statement you said “we will stop letting every claim about our product go unanswered". What claims are you referring to?

Andreas Ullmann: It's basically really about the stuff that's posted by the community. So you just need to check out Steam forums, for example. Very toxic, very hostile environment. If a game announces to use any of our products, if you check out the Steam forums, all the claims are popping in. SSDs are destroyed by our solution. The usual performance topics, and we simply don't want to leave the floor to these people who are posting all things about us anymore. We want to also be there for a person who has not heard about us before. We also want to share our view, our opinion on these topics, and also act as a trusted source of information.

I can totally understand that there is a lot of bias if we are claiming something, because we often have the complete opposite view on something than the people we are debating with. But you have to start somewhere, right? So this is now the start for this initiative, and we want to be out there. It will take some time. It will start on Discord, and later on we hope we can move over to other platforms: Reddit, Steam forums, to have official accounts and throw our comments into the discussions.

RPS: You mentioned hostility and toxicity there. Do you think there's an element of good faith (to the concerns), and how are you aiming to instill some trust or reassure these people?

Andreas Ullmann: I definitely think there should be a level of trust built. Where it comes to open communication and transparency, we have been very closed in the past, and we will change that, and we will answer questions as honestly as possible if we can answer the question. Of course, on the Discord now. I've already seen a lot of people asking for our pricing and things like this. Of course, I cannot share that, but all the other questions I try to answer as open as possible and with this, try to establish a trust relationship between the average player and us as the provider for these technologies.

Of course, I totally understand that people don't believe if I say: yeah, we don't have a performance impact on that game. There needs to be some proof for that. And I think we did a good job before launching all this in writing up our FAQ, explaining. I think that's very important, explaining how our solution works. Because if you understand how our solution works, technically, it's also easy to to understand the argumentation why our solution does not have a visible performance impact on in game performance.

RPS: Why do you think Denuvo has garnered such a poor reputation?

Andreas Ullmann: I think two main reasons. First, 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. So there is a huge community, a lot of people on this planet who are not able to play their favorite video games, because they are not willing to pay for them, and therefore they have a lot of time to spend in communities and share their view and try to blame Denuvo for a lot of things - trying to make the gaming publishers to not use our solutions so they can start playing pirate copies of games for free again.

Secondly, I think it's super hard for a gamer. I'm a gamer myself, and therefore I know what I'm talking about. I think it's super hard to see, as a gamer, what is the immediate benefit for me that a certain game developer, game publisher, is using our anti-piracy services. For anti-cheat, for example. It’s super easy. You as a player have an immediate benefit if a game uses an anti-cheat solution, because it's a fair environment in the game, and you don't need to face cheaters. It's different, though. There was a recent study about the financial impact of our protection. That study said our solution saves our customers around 20% of - or an additional 20% of revenue - if they're using our solution.

If I, as a gamer, would read that, I see: okay, then these big corporations are just making even more money. But in the end, it's not that easy. Especially currently, the gaming industry is going through a very tough time. Budgets for AAA games are in the hundreds of millions. The publishers and developers, they have to afford that upfront, and they need to get the money back within the first few weeks after release.

Image credit: BANDAI NAMCO

So it's a huge risk for them, and therefore they are looking to something like an insurance. They're looking for a way to minimize the risk for their investment. Again, this does not have an immediate benefit for me as a player. But if you look further, the more successful a game is, the the longer it will get updates. The more additional content will come to that game, the more likely it is that there will be a next iteration of the game. That's basically the benefits that we offer to the average player.

RPS: A lot of companies seem happy enough with the service Denuvo provides to keep using it. Why are you so concerned about public perception? Why not just let people have their theories and carry on doing your thing?

Andreas Ullmann: Hard to answer. So maybe it's just… maybe it's even a personal thing. I'm with the company for such a long time. The guys here are like my family, because a lot of the others here are also here for ages. It just hurts to see what's posted out there about us, even though it has been claimed wrong for hundreds of times.

On the other hand, I can imagine that this reputation also has some kind of business impact. I can imagine that certain developers, probably more in the indie region or the smaller region, are not contacting us in the first place if they are looking for solutions.

Because currently, there is only two ways to protect a game against piracy, right? Either you don't, or use our protection. There is no competitor. And I can imagine that there are developers out there who are hesitant to contact us, only because of the reputation. They would probably love to prevent piracy for their game, but they fear the hate and the toxicity of the community if they do so. And maybe they even believe all the claims that are out there - unanswered from us until today - and for this reason don't contact us in the first place.

RPS: The study you mention showed that having Denuvo software improves revenues at launch, but also showed that a certain point after release - I think it was around three months - it evens out. Do you think publishers should have a policy of eventually removing Denuvo and making that clear to players in their marketing?

Andreas Ullmann: That's the only point of the study where I'm not totally agreeing. The reason is: what is the data foundation for this? Because the person who made the study does not know our pricing structure, and without this information, it's hard to calculate the break even. It doesn't make sense anymore, if you don't know how much somebody's paying for it.

We totally agree with the statement that the initial release window is the most important one: our contracts are usually structured this way, so it's up to our clients. We are not in a position to enforce or force a customer to patch out our solution after a certain period. We leave that up to our clients. I mean, they have all the numbers. They have their sales numbers. They even have the pirate numbers for games that have been cracked. They know how much they make with a game over a certain time period. So they have all the data to calculate this break even point, or when they think that it's not worth anymore to keep our protection on. So I totally trust their view on when it it's required to be removed.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Square Enix

RPS: You’ve pushed back against some of the complaints about Denuvo tanking performance. Can you show us raw data and benchmarks to demonstrate that Denuvo games don’t affect performance? And is there scope for getting an agreed third-party (for example, a tech site like Digital Foundry) to audit the effects of Denuvo?

Andreas Ullmann: Perfect timing for this question, actually. This morning, I was going through the aftermath of our Discord opening yesterday, because I did not find the time to answer all the questions that came up there. And one question there was, of course, it's always about this performance topic. And there was a very healthy discussion started there between two users and myself about what such a test could look like. I posted a long answer in there today, so I would probably mostly repeat this answer here now as well.

So basically, I think the one question was: why don't the developers do these comparisons and post them publicly? That's something we cannot force them to do. There seems to be reasons why they are not doing it. And also, on the other hand, probably considering the toxicity of - especially the pirate community - they would probably not accept that anyway, because it could be rigged.

Second case is: we do it. We have the unprotected execute tables, usually, for the game. So we would have both available. We could do a direct comparison. But two problems there. First is we would need the approval from our customer to do that with the game. (It would be) a public post using their franchise, their IP, so we would need the okay for that. And the other one is: again, there will be claims that this is rigged. Nobody will believe us, as we are the evil ones here.

The third option is third parties. I think that will be the way to go. Of course, again we have the problem. We cannot hand out unprotected executables to a third party, probably not even if we get the okay from our customer, because this is really crucial data. So something like this would need to happen here in our office in Salzburg. But this is definitely something we can think about. Inviting, I don't know, Digital Foundry [to test our software].

That's a question I asked in the Discord, to the actual players: who they have on the radar. Who they would believe if they would post something like this. Of course, it's also important to see who is paying for the flights, who is paying for the accommodation. So this really needs to be planned carefully, so it's not possible for any site to claim that this has been rigged or somebody got paid for saying something. But this is definitely something we are currently considering

Note: Denuvo have proposed independent testing previously, though I didn't ask about this instance specifically.

Image credit: Capcom

RPS: Do you deny that Denuvo negatively affects performance in all cases?

Andreas Ullmann: No, and I think that's also something that we've stated in our FAQ on Discord. There are valid cases, especially when we are talking about the one that comes up on a regular basis: Tekken 7. That was also confirmed by by the technical producer back in the day on Twitter.

Thing is, I think it's important to understand how our solution works. And it's also worth considering, because when these performance claims come up, it's mostly this Tekken case that is referred to. But considering that we are protecting 60 to 70 games every year, it's quite interesting to see that there is only - if even - a handful of games where there was an effective performance impact cost. That's really just a minority.

RPS: You said the wrong part of the source code was selected for protection, with Tekken. Do you think you could be doing more to instruct and guide companies in the implementation of Denuvo properly?

Andreas Ullmann: It makes a lot of sense. The good thing is, most of our clients, once they start using our solution, they stick to it because they see that it's delivering and most of our customers nowadays know pretty well how to use our tooling. And we have also improved our tooling a lot so they can better validate where our protection is used in the game or where it's executed. So, yes, this is definitely something we are constantly thinking about, how we can improve these workflows.

RPS: Is there anything else you wanted to cover?

Andreas Ullmann: When there are reports about us, it's mostly done in a negative way. There are rarely references to the other tests that have been done, like Final Fantasy 15 or Hogwarts Legacy. Where both of those analyses resulted in not having a performance impact by Denuvo - so that's always interesting to see as well. And the other thing people bring up is: but there is this test: the cracked version vs. uncracked - or the the normal, protected version - and the cracked version was running faster.

That's the thing that that's bothering me the most, to be honest, that people take this as proof of our solution causing performance issues. Because most of these comparisons are first of all, coming from some unknown YouTube channels, or from some sources that are more related to or have relations into the piracy scene - and are more news and influences in the piracy scene than in the normal gaming scene.

The cracks, they don't remove our protection. The cracks still have all our code in and all our code is executed. There is even more code on top of the cracked code - that is executing on top of our code, and causing even more stuff to be executed. So there is technically no way that the cracked version is faster than the uncracked version. That's simply a technical fact. That's also because in our Discord, we have attracted quite a few reverse engineers already by now. And they are even arguing against other players posting these comments. They are basically confirming what we are claiming here.

Because what we've seen, there is really a lot of very good questions. We've seen already, a lot of people saying: I was concerned and hesitant about Denuvo, but thanks for this open communication. We appreciate it. Stuff like that. And this is exactly what we are looking for. Having honest, nice conversations with people. Talking about what we all love, which is gaming.