Why is Denuvo DRM so controversial?

Recently, it was revealed that the upcoming Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster will ship with the Denuvo digital rights management software. The video games industry has many controversial problems, whether it’s the shuttering of many, many, studios or increasing toxic backlash from a highly strung yet vocal minority. Denuvo is just one more contentious topic to add to the pile.

But what is it that makes it controversial among a lot of gamers? In this modern era, there’s an argument that if you’re a developer or publisher of games, you’d like to invest some of your funds into methods that protect your intellectual property.

Denuvo: what is it?

With the rise of digital gaming, companies have taken strides to ensure their titles are protected from potential piracy. That’s essentially what digital rights management is. Those who recall the days of CDs—particularly in the late 90s and early 2000s—will remember DRM as a modern way for record companies to stop music lovers from copying albums and distributing them without having to hand over more money.

In a nutshell, that’s what the Austrian-formed Denuvo Software Solutions is all about, but for video games. It’s been on the market for ten years, and it’s been used in many releases to crack down on piracy while also preventing anyone from tampering with the product.

Studios can license the software for their – usually PC – games. There was a time when anyone could “crack” a game disc, so it became possible to make multiple (and illegal) copies for free, but DRM makes it more difficult, especially today. Denuvo Anti-Cheat was also developed for the Nintendo Switch to protect against unlicensed emulation.

Why is Denuvo so controversial, then?

Aside from any possible rebellious cries against capitalism, Denuvo does appear to incite its fair share of anger from PC gamers outside the usual torrent of games being unleashed to the world in clearly unfinished states.

Denuvo has been a point of contention due to how it affects overall performance, as it hogs a lot of CPU power. You don’t have to look far to find stories of titles being review bombed or having a negative critical response from fans due to how it performs on PC, especially when it comes to framerates.

For example, Tekken 7 launched and was immediately the subject of DRM controversy. The game’s director, Katsuhiro Harada, spoke out on Twitter/X about notable frame drops but made it clear that they weren’t related to a system’s GPU or CPU.

A further post from Harada mentioned ” anti-tamper third-party middleware” as the culprit. While Denuvo wasn’t mentioned, we do know that Tekken 7 came loaded with it, so the director was almost certainly talking about it specifically. Denuvo was eventually removed from Tekken 7, though criticisms over games eventually taking it out are another discussion.

Arkane Studios was also forced to investigate stuttering problems after it became apparent that Deathloop was experiencing poor performance on PC. A few years back, one of the game’s community managers posted on Reddit, saying the team was—at the time—prioritizing “investigating the issue right now.” Again, Denuvo was not mentioned at an official level, but comments underneath certainly knew where to place the blame.

The removal of Denuvo

According to this Wiki list, 247 games use Denuvo DRM anti-tamper software as of July 4, 2024. These aren’t obscure titles, either. Many of them are AAA releases, including the remake of Resident Evil 4, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and even stuff that’s not yet been released, like the 20th-anniversary edition of Beyond Good & Evil.

Over the years, things have gotten to the point where gamers decided to take matters into their own hands. I’m referring, of course, to when a modder actually went ahead and removed Denuvo themselves from Resident Evil Village. While you could see this as an angry, knee-jerk reaction to the controversial software’s implementation, benchmark tests – such as this one from Digital Foundry – discovered that performance improved notably on PC.

Since then, Capcom has not only issued a patch to address issues gamers were facing but eventually removed the offending DRM from RE: Village entirely. Other games to follow suit include Ghostwire: Tokyo, Doom Eternal, and Lies of P, which had only been out for a few months when Denuvo was removed.

The fact that so many studios and publishers do go ahead and remove it after the fact speaks volumes. A piece of software meant to protect a product that instead becomes known for how it affects game performance almost smacks of anti-consumer tactics, not that I think Irdeto – the current owner of the Denuvo company – is doing this intentionally.

To close out this piece, check out the curated list of Steam games that have removed the software post-release. I can’t vouch entirely for its accuracy, but it’s hard not to conclude that Denuvo is perhaps the constant. Best case scenario: it’s an unpopular method of protecting intellectual property. Worse case: it’s disruptive, at least from a gaming perspective.