The Austrian company behind the copy and cheat protection Denuvo has had enough of its bad image. After unsuccessful attempts to communicate with players via a Discord server, a representative of the company, Andreas Ullmann, now speaks in an interview about gamers’ prejudices, the alleged performance degradation of games, and the poor image of the company.
This is Denuvo’s action: We reported about it on MeinMMO on October 20: Denuvo has launched an initiative to improve its image. Through a Discord server, they wanted to engage with players to clear up misunderstandings.
The project was designed for 2 months, but after just 2 days they had to switch the Discord server to “Read only”. There were simply too many insults coming in.
Now they are trying it differently: Product Manager Andreas Ullmann, who has been with Denuvo for more than 10 years, spoke on October 23 with Rock Paper Shotgun about Denuvo and why gamers hate the company so much.
He also had brilliant ideas:
Pirates can’t play, have time to complain about Denuvo
Why do gamers hate Denuvo?
First: Our solution simply works. Pirates cannot play games that use our solution for an extended period, usually until the publisher decides to patch our solution.
So there is a huge community, a lot of people on this planet who are unable to play their favorite video games because they are not willing to pay for them, and therefore they have a lot of time to share their views in communities and try to hold Denuvo responsible for many things – they are trying to pressure game publishers not to use our solutions so they can go back to playing pirated games for free.
The second reason is that it is hard for players to understand why games need any copy protection or cheat protection at all. They don’t seem to provide any direct benefits for players. But Ullmann explains: Copy protection is essential for the success of a game. And the more successful a game is, the longer it will continue to be developed.
Denuvo no longer wants to leave the field to the haters
How does the hate manifest? Ullmann says:
You just have to look at the Steam forums, for example. A very toxic, very hostile environment. When a game announces it will use one of our products, all sorts of claims arise in the Steam forums. SSDs are destroyed by our solution. The usual performance issues, and we just don’t want to leave the floor to these people who post everything about us. We also want to be there for people who have never heard of us. We want to share our perspective, our opinion on these issues and act as a trustworthy source of information.
Why is this important to them at all? The interviewer asks Ullmann why he even cares about what players think. What matters is that companies believe in Denuvo and use the product.
Ullmann says: He has been with the company for so long and feels like it’s a family that it hurts him and others in the company to read so much hate, which is also simply wrong.
At the moment, there are two ways to protect your game from pirates:
- Either not at all
- Or you use protection through Denuvo
He believes developers might be hesitant to approach Denuvo because the reputation is so bad and they fear that they, too, will receive hate if they work with Denuvo.
Does Denuvo negatively affect performance? Ullmann says there are some valid cases where this is indeed the case. But these cases are far rarer than people claim. They protect about 60 to 70 games a year, and often the criticism then focuses on one game, like now with Tekken 7. But there are only, if any, a handful of games where Denuvo degrades performance: Controversial software company from Austria wants to talk to gamers for 2 months – lasts only 2 days
