Inside is the indie game from the team that brought us Limbo, and is highly regarded critically. It is nominated for Game Of The Year at this year’s The Game Awards. But it also uses the anti-tampering software Denuvo.
What’s Denuvo? It’s a new breed of DRM (Digital Rights Management) i.e. the thing that keeps these softwares from being pirated easily. DRM has a bad rep- one of the most notorious was used on Spore where the copy of the game can only be installed 5 times- non-refundable if you uninstall it. Denuvo takes another approach- it just makes it hard for crackers to get to the part where the game can be cracked- hence the “anti-tampering” label.
Denuvo has deterred some PC games, mostly big titles, from being cracked on day 1. It’s so hard that the Chinese scene group 3DM gave up on cracking Denuvo games. It’s not impossible though, just recently Deus Ex: Mankind Divided just got cracked, but plenty of big titles like FIFA 17 and Dishonored 2 are yet to be cracked.
In a nutshell, it’s pretty good at deterring cracks on the first few months, boosting initial launch sales.
But Denuvo also has a bad rep. Some say it can deter the health of hard disks, and some are just against it as, like DRM, legit buyers are somewhat punished and yet free players out there can circumvent this anyway, making DRM pointless.
To see Inside, an indie game, to employ such security is already surprising, but to pull it out in an update for the Steam version is another surprise. Sure, the game is just now available on GOG- the platform where all games are DRM-less, but the devs took effort to remove it on Steam as well.
Which means Denuvo is used for the right reason- to deter day 1 pirates and secure good sales in the first few months of release. Either that or the Denuvo protection is not worth it for a game like Inside.
Good on them to do so, players, pirates and paying ones alike, are praising this direction.
Remember, support the developers by buying the game if you like what you have tried. It keeps them doing their jobs, and we get to play more games from them in the future.