Denuvo Announces Plan To Fail To Combat Online Game Cheaters After Failing To Stop Piracy With Its DRM

For years now, we have discussed Denuvo's reputation sliding from being once thought of as the potential ender of video game piracy to just another DRM corpse fit for the funeral pyre. Despite this precipitous fall, we also discussed a few months back that the company had been bought by another security company, Irdeto. While the announcement of the deal was generally bizarre, with Irdeto referring to Denuvo as the "world leader" in gaming security, we mentioned at the time that Irdeto is mostly invested in anti-cheating platforms for online gaming. It seemed likely that Irdeto thought that Denuvo's tech might somehow fit into that chief offering.

And now, with an announcement from Irdeto, it indeed seems that Denuvo is pivoting to combating online cheating.

Today, Iredeto announced that they're joining the Esports Integrity Coalition (ESIC). And perhaps more importantly, Denuvo will soon launch its own anti-cheat technology to help solve this problem.

"Denuvo's Anti-Cheat technology, which is soon to be launched as a full end-to-end solution, will prevent hackers in multiplayer games from manipulating and distorting data and code to gain an advantage over other gamers or bypass in-game micro-transactions," the company says.

On the one hand, look, cheaters in online games suck out loud. These cheaters break the online gaming experience for all the non-cheaters out there. Perhaps more importantly, anti-cheating software is going to become a very real market ripe to be exploited, given the explosive growth in competitive online eSports and online gaming in general. If any company or group of companies could manage to end this infestation for gamers, they'd deserve a hero's parade.

On the other hand: this is Denuvo. Few companies have rivaled Denuvo's boisterous claims and posture coupled with the failure of its product. It would be very easy to change out the references to anti-cheating software in the Irdeto quote above and replace them with references to Denuvo's DRM and map that onto how Denuvo talked about its DRM product but a few years ago. Same promises, different product. I can only assume that anyone partnering with Irdeto for Denuvo anti-cheating software are basing that decision more on the reputation of Irdeto than Denuvo.

I have no idea if Denuvo will be successful in stamping out online gaming cheating. But, given the company's history of failure, I know where I'd place my chips if put to a bet.