Denuvo claims not to refund game studios after security cracking

Austria’s Denuvo says it will not refund developers if its security for games is cracked. With that, the company is responding to messages that claim that. Security is said to have recently been removed from Doom, as it has accomplished its purpose.

Denuvo co-founder Robert Hernandez explains in an interview with Kotaku that “he can’t say anything about agreements with individual customers, but the company won’t refund if a game is cracked within a certain time.” However, that does not mean that developers can remove the protection from their games themselves, for example if they want to offer it on platforms for games without DRM.

In the case of Doom, the protection was removed, because the system had achieved its goal: “Doom’s protection lasted several months, which is already a remarkable achievement for such a remarkable game”. The purpose of the security was to protect the game during its initial release period, Hernandez said. “We don’t offer Denuvo as an unbreakable security, but as a means to protect games in the critical early period,” he adds.

In addition to Doom, the Inside game removed Denuvo protection in November. When the measure was removed from Doom, a user on Reddit who said he works for a game studio claimed that Denuvo will refund developers in the event that its security fails within a three-month period. The cost of security is said to be “millions of dollars.” For Doom, the removal meant, among other things, that the PC no longer needs to be connected to the Internet once every 24 hours.

Denuvo seemed unbreakable for a long time, until the hacker Voksi published a work-around in August, including for Doom and Inside. Other games that were free to play despite security include Rise of the Tomb Raider and Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst.