It is still common for major games to launch with Denuvo's Anti-Tamper anti-piracy software, and it is also common for performance issues with those games to be blamed on said DRM. 2018's acquisition of Denuvo, digital security firm Irdeto (which previously tried to force Overwatch porn offline) most recently denied in an interview with Ars Technica that its software was the cause of these problems.

Steve Huynh, Irdeto's chief operating officer for video games, claims that comparisons using cracked versions of games that load quickly and run smoothly are inaccurate." "During the life of a game," Huin said, "there may be protected and unprotected versions." These are different builds over a six-month period, with many bug fixes, etc., and could be better or worse, so they cannot be compared."

Huin is aware that simply saying this does not prove anything to the legions of players who blame Denuvo for every frame rate drop they experience. 'Our voices, unfortunately, are not enough to convince people. Because we are not trusted in their minds as a starting point for that argument," he said.

But Irdeto has a plan. It is a program in which media representatives will be provided with two versions of their games, one with and one without Denuvo Anti-Tamper, and asked to benchmark each. Apparently, they hope to launch it within a few months.

Personally, I doubt that such a plan will change anyone's mind. Durante has already done the exact same thing in 2015, hiring Durante to benchmark "Final Fantasy 15" with and without Denuvo's software installed. but may have caused a slight (approximately 6.7%) increase in load times.

Redditers did not stop to blame Denuvo for all the frame rate glitches they experienced, and when it turned out that the performance problems in Resident Evil Village were not the result of Denuvo, but of Capcom's own DRM It was. People have reasons to oppose anti-piracy software anyway, besides potential stutters.

First, it's not just performance that DRM affects, as was the case when it was discovered that DRM made games unplayable on Intel Alder Lake CPUs, or when Denuvo's domain went down over the weekend and "Guardians of the Galaxy" and " DRM could prevent a game from running at all, as it did when games like "Persona 4 Golden" were unable to launch.

Then there is the philosophical objection: DRM gets in the way of game modding and preservation efforts aimed at making sure older games are not lost. Currently, five Capcom games, including "Street Fighter X Tekken" and "Lost Planet 2," are unplayable on Steam due to Games for Windows Live and have been for over 600 days. With evidence of such an impact before our eyes, no amount of benchmarking will prevent players from distrusting anti-piracy software.