The Austrian company behind the copy and cheat protection Denuvo has had enough of its bad image. After unsuccessful attempts to talk to players via a Discord server, a representative of the company, Andreas Ullmann, now speaks out in an interview about gamers’ prejudices, the alleged deterioration in game performance and the company’s poor image.
This is Denuvo’s action: We reported about it on MeinMMO on October 20th: Denuvo has started an initiative to improve its image. The aim was to use a Discord server to talk to players in order to clear up misunderstandings.
The project was designed to last 2 months, but after just 2 days the Discord server had to be switched to “Read only”. There were just too many insults.
Now they’re trying something different: Product Manager Andreas Ullmann, who has been with Denuvo for more than 10 years, spoke to Rock Paper Shotgun on October 23rd about Denuvo and why gamers hate the company so much.
He also had brilliant ideas:
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Pirates can’t play, they have time to gossip about Denuvo
Why do gamers hate Denuvo?
First: Our solution simply works. Pirates will not be able to play games that use our solution for an extended period of time, usually until the publisher decides to patch our solution.
So there’s a huge community, a lot of people on this planet who are unable to play their favorite video games because they’re not willing to pay for them, and so they have a lot of time to express their views in communities sharing and trying to blame Denuvo for a lot of things – they’re trying to get the game publishers to stop using our solutions so they can start playing pirated games for free again.
The second reason is that it is difficult for players to understand why games need copy protection or cheat protection at all. They wouldn’t bring any direct benefits for players. But Ullmann explains: Copy protection is important for the success of a game. And the more successful a game is, the longer the game will continue to be developed.
Denuvo no longer wants to leave the field to the haters
How does hate manifest itself? Ullmann says:
Just look at the Steam forums, for example. A very toxic, very hostile environment. When a game announces that it uses one of our products, all claims appear in the Steam forums. SSDs are destroyed by our solution. The usual performance topics, and we just don’t want to let these people who post everything about us have the floor anymore. We also want to be there for people who have never heard of us. We also want to share our perspective, our opinion on these topics and also act as a trustworthy source of information.
Why does this even matter to them? The interviewer asks Ullmann why he even cares what players think. The only important thing is that companies believe in Denuvo and use the product.
Ullmann says: He has been with the company for so long and feels like he is part of a family that it simply hurts him and others in the company to read so much hate that is simply wrong.
At the moment there are two ways to protect your game from pirates:
He believes it could be that developers are hesitant to approach Denuvo because of its bad reputation and because developers fear that they too will receive hate if they work with Denuvo.
Does Denuvo have a negative impact on performance? Ullmann says there are some valid cases where this is actually the case. But these cases are much rarer than people claim. You protect around 60 to 70 games a year and the criticism often focuses on one game, like Tekken 7 now. But there are only a handful of games, if any, where Denuvo worsens the performance: Controversial software Company from Austria wants to talk to gamers for 2 months – only lasts 2 days