Denuvo Analysis

User Experience and Platform Issues

• Several users say Denuvo has made the experience worse for paying customers than for pirates, especially around installation, bans, and offline play.
• Linux/Proton users report games that won’t launch, temporary bans when changing configurations or Proton prefixes, and always-online requirements.
• Others counter that many Denuvo games “just work” for most users on supported OSes and hardware, and issues on Linux are framed as using an unsupported platform.

Performance Impact Debate

• One side cites benchmarks showing significant FPS drops, worse 1% lows, longer load times, and noticeable hitching when Denuvo is enabled.
• Another side points to tests where average FPS deltas are tiny and Denuvo checks run infrequently, arguing that complaints are exaggerated or conflated with generally poor AAA optimization.
• There is agreement that if developers protect the wrong functions or put checks in hot paths, performance can suffer.

Effectiveness and Cracking Ecosystem

• Consensus: Denuvo is highly effective at delaying piracy, especially near launch; many recent versions remain uncracked.
• Others note numerous Denuvo-protected games that have been cracked, often after months or after publishers remove Denuvo.
• Discussion highlights that cracking is possible in principle but often not worth the huge time investment given that protection is usually temporary.

DRM Ethics, Economics, and “Optimal Piracy”

• Critics: DRM punishes legitimate buyers, invades users’ machines, harms preservation, and treats customers as presumed criminals.
• Supporters: creators have the right to protect revenue; some piracy is tolerable but reducing it helps fund future games.
• A recurring idea: the “optimal” level of piracy is non-zero, and the best anti-piracy is convenience and fair pricing (e.g., Steam’s model).

Longevity, Preservation, and Subscription Model

• Denuvo is usually licensed as a subscription; many publishers remove it after the initial sales window to save costs and avoid long-term breakage.
• This is seen by some as a reasonable compromise (strong launch protection, later archival viability) and by others as still ethically unacceptable.

Technical and RE Discussion

• Commenters dig into Denuvo’s use of VM-based obfuscation, “stolen” constants/instructions provided by a server, heavy use of MBA (mixed Boolean/arithmetic) obfuscation, and UD2/exception tricks.
• Tools and LLVM passes (e.g., SiMBA, Gamba, related projects) are mentioned as ways to simplify MBAs, with notes that Denuvo itself has released some of these, implying it has more advanced techniques internally.

Indies, Alternatives, and Consumer Response

• Some avoid any Denuvo games and buy only DRM-free titles (GOG, itch.io) or older/indie games.
• Others argue DRM for indies is counterproductive, as piracy can act as marketing and word-of-mouth.
• A number of participants simply “vote with their wallet” and treat Denuvo as a deal-breaker.