Sega Sticks With Denuvo
The next couple of weeks are set to be rather busy ones for Sega. They are, after all, releasing both Team Sonic Racing and Total War: Three Kingdoms. While the latter is perhaps the one with the higher expectations, this could represent a significant factor in if 2019 is a good or great year for Sega.
In a report via DSOGaming, however, these releases might have just sparked some fresh debate in the PC community. Why? Well, Sega has confirmed that both of the releases will include the Denuvo anti-piracy protections.
Why The Controversy?
There has been a long-standing argument in the PC community as to how much the inclusion of the Denuvo software affects the overall performance of a game. As it is effectively there to ensure that a legitimate copy is being run, the program is (essentially) always lurking there in the background. As such, it has led many to accuse it of gobbling up system resources. A claim which (in the spirit of honestly) has a lot of interesting but not exactly conclusive evidence.
In fairness, a claim that has been backed up by the recent accidental release of the non-Denuvo version of Resident Evil 2. A version which was found to be around 4-12 FPS faster without it.
Total War!
While Sonic Team Racing might not cause too many concerns, Total War: Three Kingdoms definitely will. The game franchise already has a strong reputation for needing a solid system to get the best out of it. As such, losing out on performance simply due to the inclusion of Denuvo will not leave many happy.
With just over a week to go until both games are released, however, we don’t have long to wait to find out!
What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!
I’ve never had any issues with games that used Denuvo. If people need someone to be angry at for Denuvo and other anti-piracy measures, blame the filthy pirates for making it necessary, not the developers and publishers trying to make an honest living.
While I agree with previous comment about Denuvo being the result of rampant piracy, it is also the cause of much of it. As people become more and more frustrated by being punished for being legitimate consumers (forced to buy a game on the Epic Games Store, forced to use Denuvo and thus forced to connect to the internet to play a game, even in single player mode), many of those people get tired of the shackles and simply grab a cracked version of the game so that they don’t have to put up with all of the nonsense. The PC game market is especially sensitive to this kind of thing, so publishers should proceed with caution. Denuvo came from a Sony legacy, a company that is known for its draconian and intrusive attempts at enforcing their copyrights, which almost always fail in the end and accomplish almost nothing other than inconveniencing the consumers upon which they depend.
I don’t pirate games — I believe that developers (and even most of the sometimes-irritating publishers which bring games to market) should be paid for their hard work. But, I also don’t like software on my PC lurking in the background and doing who-knows-what. So, if I know that a game is leveraging Denuvo, I will generally avoid it, at least at release, and hope that the shop wises up and drops it in future patches (like was done for Doom and Inside, among many others). Once the game is “clean,” then I will consider purchasing and supporting it.