Denuvo, the anti-tamper and digital rights management (DRM) software from Irdeto that many game publishers have chosen to implement in their games to prevent piracy, has less of an impact on performance than what many critics might believe, according to new tests carried out by a developer who spent five months reverse engineering and bypassing Denuvo in Hogwarts Legacy, the immersive, open-world action RPG that Avalanche Software and Warner Bros. Games launched in February 2023. Steeve Huin, Irdeto’s COO of Video Games, stressed in an interview last year that his company’s anti-piracy tech has no performance impact.
A video that suggests minimal performance impact:
One can see that Denuvo does indeed intervene from time to time, but what one can clearly see: It doesn’t do that very often. It’s only once every few seconds. Even less, sometimes it doesn’t do anything. Only when major things happen, scene switches, loading screens or similar, the logs seem to accumulate. …Denuvo executes checks so infrequently, that the likelyhood of it causing major performance issues seems rather low.
Huin said last year:
- “…the effort of applying the security and validating that the performance is as it was and is not impacted. In the case of anti-tamper, I think there is a clear statement that there is no perceptible impact on gameplay because of the way we do things.”
- “In the pirating/cracking community, we’re seen as evil because we’re helping DRM exist and we’re ensuring people make money out of games. But people typically don’t think enough of that.”
- “Anti-piracy technologies is to the benefit of the game publishers, [but also] is of benefit to the players in that it protects the [publisher’s] investment and it means the publishers can then invest in the next game.”
- “Whether people want to believe it or not, we are all gamers, we love gaming, we love being part of it. We develop technologies with the intent to make the industry better and stronger.”
The Irdeto website also notes:
Since only performance non-critical game functions are used in the Anti-Tamper process, Anti-Tamper has no perceptible effect on game performance nor is Anti-Tamper to blame for any game crashes of genuine executables.