Digital security company Irdeto announced today that it has acquired Denuvo, the anti-tampering software company that gamers love to hate. Irdeto said in a statement that the acquisition will enable it to "grow the addressable market for its core technology and anti-piracy services."
Denuvo is best known as an anti-piracy tool, although some recent versions of the software haven't held up very well against the efforts of crackers. But Irdeto also emphasized the technology's value as an anti-cheating tool for online gaming, saying that it can be used to keep players from "manipulating and distorting data and code to gain an advantage over other gamers or bypass in-game micro-transactions."
"The success of any game title is dependent upon the ability of the title to operate as the publisher intended," Irdeto CEO Doug Lowther said in a statement. "As a result, protection of both the game itself and the gaming experience for end users is critical. Our partnership brings together decades of security expertise under one roof to better address new and evolving security threats. We are looking forward to collaborating as a team on a number of initiatives to improve our core technology and services to better serve our customers."
But modders are living proof that games don't need to "operate as the publisher intended" to succeed, and despite the value of anti-cheat protections to publishers, one of the most common complaints about Denuvo is that the technology also dramatically degrades performance. Whether those complaints are accurate or not, the bottom line is that from the publisher's perspective, the DRM works well enough to keep using. Denuvo 4.8, which is used to protect Assassin's Creed: Origins among other games, was only cracked yesterday, according to DSOG. That's a long stretch for DRM technology to hold out, and thanks to the presence of VMProtect alongside Denuvo, Origins itself still hasn't been cracked.
Denuvo is a familiar name to a lot of gamers, but Irdeto might ring a bell, too: They're the outfit that tried to force Overwatch porn off the internet. (It didn't work.)
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