Denuvo, the developer of and name for, the controversial piece of anti-tamper DRM that helps prevent games from being pirated soon after release -- sometimes effectively, more recently, less so -- has been purchased in its entirety. The new owner is called Irdeto, the company that many will remember for taking a stab at having all Overwatch porn removed from the internet. As PCG points out, that effort was doomed to fail.
This is an interesting time for Irdeto to make the purchase though, because as effective as Denuvo has been at stopping crackers, its success in recent months has been a mixed bag. In some titles, like Assassin's Creed: Origins, it's done well, though that was when it was combined with VMProtect. In others, it hasn't faired so well. It's also been accused of slowing game performance by demanding high-CPU cycles itself.
That didn't put Irdeto off though, which sees Denuvo as not only a good tool for preventing piracy, but also one that's useful for preventing hacking and cheating online, by making it difficult to modify game files on the fly.
"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."
The future success of Denuvo is far from guaranteed, but Irdeto is certainly confident in its future and that could mean we continue to see it bundled with games in the foreseeable future.
