007: First Light, developed by IO Interactive (of Hitman fame), is one of the most anticipated games coming out this year, but it seems to have hit a roadblock right before the finishing line. The game's Steam listing has just revealed that it comes with "Denovo Anti-Tamper" DRM to safeguard against piracy on PC. As you'd expect, customers who paid for the game in advance are frustrated.
Steam Forums for the latest James Bond adventure are now filled with players expressing their disappointment and, conversely, a few trolls showing gratitude for the DRM's inclusion. To be clear, pretty much every modern game release on PC is protected by DRM to some degree; Steam has a built-in DRM feature that many titles use as a basic precaution, for instance. It's easy to bypass, however, as it usually requires just swapping out a single .dll file with a fake one that passes the ownership check.
That being said, adding Denuvo is a deliberate choice. The software has even been found to affect FPS in certain cases, and it's not free. Studios spent millions to incorporate it in their titles, only for it to end up affecting the people who actually bought the game. The pirates will always find a way, whether it's through hypervisor bypasses or just conventional cracks that break the DRM entirely.
Speaking of which, all current versions of Denuvo have already been cracked by a new voice in the community. Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight was pirated on day one, coinciding with the game's official launch just yesterday. It was in early access for three days before that for those who pre-ordered it, which is likely the window of opportunity the pirate utilized to ready the crack.
Therefore, 007: First Light shipping with Denuvo only hurts paying customers who might experience slightly worse performance because the DRM is consuming CPU cycles. It's one of the most common misconceptions in the community that Denuvo Anti-Tamper runs at the kernel level — it does not; those are anti-cheat programs. Denuvo runs entirely in user space and is embedded inside the game's executable.
That's why mods that alter the game's .exe file in any way are shut down because of Denuvo's strict memory-injecting protections. Also, if your internet ever goes down and the game hasn't pinged Denuvo's servers for more than 48 hours, it may even refuse to launch. There is an entire Steam Forums page dedicated to these lockouts, and we recently saw the PlayStation community fall into turmoil because of a similar policy, too.
Now, we're not going to sit here and pretend that piracy will magically fade away if there's no Denuvo to incentivize the pirates even more. Those familiar with the seven seas will chart that course no matter what, but it ends up being a paradox for the paying customer. From the developers' perspective, it's a no-brainer to use DRM to maximize sales rather than to protect the customer who has already paid.
And it's not like the devs don't have any other choice to curb illegal installs; Cyberpunk 2077 famously dropped without DRM and in a broken state, but it's since established itself as one of the most successful games in recent memory. Of course, we don't condone piracy, but a good game should and will sell on the merit of its quality.
Moreover, piracy is actually shown to increase overall sales, according to a 2017 European Commission report, a few years after Denuvo launched. Illegal users often convert to paying ones. Some people use pirated games as demos before buying the real thing, and many of us pirated games in our childhood, which led us to become part of the hobby as paying adults, adding another customer to the industry.
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