Competitive multiplayer gaming is hugely popular. Fortnite, Apex Legends, Call of Duty, and PUBG are some of the games that have millions of active players per month. Unsurprisingly, some players use cheating software to gain an unfair advantage in these games.Anti-cheat software aims to solve this problem. However, anti-cheat tools are not without controversy, and one example of this is Denuvo Anti-Cheat software.So, let's see what Denuvo DRM and Anti-Cheat is and why it is so controversial.
What Is DRM and Anti-Cheat Software?
When it comes to video games, cheats have always been around. From spawning tons of weapons in Grand Theft Auto to seeing through walls (wall-hacking) in FPS games like Counter-Strike and Call of Duty, video game cheats allow players to gain an unfair advantage by exploiting the game's core systems.
An anti-cheat tool is a piece of software integrated into the game to control cheating by detecting cheaters and banning them. Anti-cheat software either works from the user mode or the kernel mode.
DRM—or Digital Rights Management—software, on the other hand, deals primarily with protecting the game's code and DLLs from being hooked, hijacked, or tampered with in any way, ensuring the integrity of the game code and preventing piracy.
What Is Denuvo and How Does It Work?
Denuvo is primarily a DRM software. Additionally, it's an anti-cheat solution that stops people from cracking and pirating games and also identifies and bans cheaters in multiplayer games.
Denuvo is most famous or, in the videogame circle, rather infamous for its key feature—anti-tamper protection. When implemented as a DRM, it employs techniques like obfuscation, anti-debugging implementations, virtualization, and encryption on the video game's core files to fortress the video game from being reverse-engineered and cracked by video game piracy groups. It also implements online activation and hardware signing to prevent unauthorized access to the game.
Denuvo as an anti-cheat is an equally tough nut to crack. Once a cheater is detected, the anti-cheat "fingerprints" the offender and notifies the game developer. Game hackers are cornered and left with no choice but to rely on the complex task of writing kernel drivers as the last resort to bypass Denuvo's anti-cheating measures.
How the anti-cheat software works exactly is confidential and not officially disclosed by the developers as it is not open-source software. On the surface, it is an anti-cheat middleware that works by analyzing game files and cheat tools installed on the machine.
Like many other anti-cheat programs, Denuvo Anti-Cheat relies on kernel-level drivers. In other words, when Denuvo runs, it has the highest level of privileges that software, besides the operating system's kernel, can have. And this is where the heart of the controversy lies—Denuvo Anti-Cheat's kernel-level access.
Why Do Some People Hate Denuvo?
Denuvo Anti-Cheat uses kernel-level drivers to function. So, if someone manages to exploit it to gain access to the kernel, they can access almost everything stored on your computer. Although Denuvo Anti-Cheat is a potential privacy threat, its anti-tamper protection software that is subject to unanimous criticism by the gaming community and the developers. Here are some of the reasons why some people hate Denuvo:
Denuvo Can Cause Performance Issues
Denuvo's Anti-Tamper tool is widely believed to impact gaming performance seriously. It is allegedly so bad that Tekken 7's director, Katsuhiro Harada, blamed Denuvo for the poor performance of Tekken 7's PC port. Unfortunately, Denuvo's effect on performance was not restricted to only Tekken 7.
Almost all games that are protected by Denuvo anti-tamper suffer from increased loading times, lower frame rates, and other performance issues. It's almost impossible to navigate without knowing how to improve performance on your gaming laptop or PC.
Denuvo Makes Modding Difficult
Since Denuvo anti-tamper software's focal point is protecting the integrity of game files, it shuts down all attempts of modding the game which is not at all welcomed by the gaming community.
Modding is a core facet of the PC gaming community. You take that away from them, and there's no way you can't expect an uproar from an upset mob of creatives who are stripped of their right to add flair to the game, improving it in more than one way.
Take Grand Theft Auto V for example. What would it be without the modding community, that, over the years, kept adding content and introducing new stuff in the game, keeping it alive for almost a decade? Other examples of community-driven games include ARMA 3, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R franchise, and more.
Denuvo Can Leave Developers With a Hefty Bill
Denuvo is costly. From gamers, it draws performance and from developers, it draws large license fees. Denuvo is a service-based product that requires a license to be activated and kept in deployment.
Many developers have reported that the cost-to-benefit ratio is not efficient, as many Denuvo-protected games have been cracked with some under-cracking progress. Although Denuvo anti-tamper is hard to tackle, it's not impossible, and a few video game piracy groups have proved it time and again by cracking in-demand video game titles within their peak phase of sales.
Although Denuvo's Anti-Cheat and Anti-Tamper programs are not the same, people associate Denuvo with bad performance.
In short, Denuvo Anti-Cheat is controversial because it is a perceived privacy risk and allegedly causes frame rate drops in games. However, there is no concrete evidence that the tool is either a security risk or responsible for poor gaming performance on its own.
Video Game Anti-Cheats and DRM Software Are Here to Stay
As the gaming industry expands, cheat development and piracy will grow. And to make sure they are not losing revenue because of piracy and cheating, video game developers will continue to package DRM and anti-cheat software with their games.
So, when it comes to anti-cheats, you'll have to learn to live with them.