Denuvo, like DRM in general, offers no benefit to legitimate game owners. In fact, Denuvo explicitly strips away significant rights of ownership that legitimate owners have traditionally enjoyed and reasonably expected on an open platform like the PC. Denuvo blocks many forms of modding, which prevents owners from extending the functionality of their games or adding new features (e.g. GeDoSaTo, ENB, MP mods), prevents fan-made patches that fix bugs or restore content (e.g. VtMB, KOTOR 2), prevents conversions and unofficial expansions (e.g. The Long War, Endereal, Gekokujo), and prevents the creation of compatibility mods that help to preserve old games long after their publishers have abandoned supporting them (e.g. MMO private servers, System Shock Portable, OpenRA).

Denuvo also further guts preservation by making games dependent on online activation with third-party servers. Once it's no longer expedient for a publisher to maintain those servers, they get turned off, as does the ability for owners of that game, present and future, to install and play it. Fundamentally, Denuvo positions the publisher as a gatekeeper between the owner of the game and the game itself, requiring the owner to ask permission of the publisher before interacting with the game in any major way. If permission is not granted, for any reason or no reason, the owner must comply without recourse. It's a big shift in the zero-sum power balance between players and publishers. Denuvo gives players nothing, it only takes away what they already have.

And it's especially galling how comparatively little the publishers currently stand to gain in relation to how much everyone else stands to lose. Denuvo's existence is justified as an anti-piracy measure (the idea being that legitimate owners should forfeit their rights for the justice of the publisher capitalizing on their maximum potential sales). Publishers have long claimed that piracy deprives them of 90% or more of their rightful sales on PC (Ubisoft has said as much as 97%). If that were true, eliminating piracy would directly boost their sales by a gargantuan degree, an order of magnitude or more. Now that Denuvo has arrived and successfully halted all piracy of many games over the last year, we can begin to see if those dramatic publisher claims of lost sales are even close to being accurate. Although specific sales figures are, naturally, tightly kept secrets by publishers, we can see via Steamspy that Denuvo-protected games have not shown any remarkable explosions in sales compared to similar titles without Denuvo. Denuvo games sell essentially on par with similar non-Denuvo games. In fact, publishers themselves who have been selling Denuvo games have not made any announcements of big sales growth due to their PC games becoming un-pirateable, a business success that one would think they'd be eager to extol (especially in the case of publicly traded companies) if such a thing were true.

The inconvenient truth, which ironically is not so hidden anymore now that publishers have gotten their wish of impregnable DRM, is that piracy was not systematically displacing large amounts of otherwise full sales, as publishers had claimed. I'm inclined to credit this to the exceptionally strong price competition on the PC platform in recent years. Whether publishers' claims had a kernel of truth a long time ago, before the current era of broad competition, there is sadly no data to shed light on things, but it is at least more plausible than today.

Before the innovative efforts of PC game distributors like Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle, and so on, pricing was far less flexible and availability was far worse, leaving many potential customers with no reasonable legitimate middleground between piracy and nothing. There were also no high-quality free-to-play games like League of Legends or World of Tanks to further mop up players with more desire to play than money to spend. To the extent that piracy was actually depriving publishers of real sales, it was predominantly a consequence of those publishers failing to meet the demands of markets that they didn't understand (practically the entire world outside of North America and western Europe). Now that great strides have been made to meet players halfway, with things like variable pricing, wider availability, and free to play, more players are playing games legitimately than ever before.

In turn, the number who pirate when they would genuinely buy otherwise has plunged. We see that those who do pirate are mostly either those who would not buy anyway (e.g. pirating as a hobby, or teenagers being teenagers) or those who do buy anyway (e.g. pirating for demoing or archiving/preservation), neither of which are additional sales being lost. Once Denuvo arrived a year ago, it was a strong-arm 'solution' to a problem whose essence was already well underway to being solved through the soft power of an increasingly flexible and competitive market. When Denuvo swept back the curtain of piracy, there was no towering treasure trove of extra sales ready to be reaped, there were only the dusty traces of players neglected by publishers a gaming generation ago.

Even if publishers were trying to sweeten the bitter pill of Denuvo for owners by doing things like sharing the profits of those mythical enormously increased sales through lower day-1 pricing, or ensuring that the Denuvo activation server check-in would automatically expire and be disabled after the game's launch window had closed, I still think Denuvo is a rotten deal for anyone who cares about and understands the enormous value to gamers of the PC being an open platform.

Denuvo is one of many efforts (Microsoft is especially guilty of such) to clamp down on the PC and corral its enormous distributed power into fewer hands for the sake of profit and control. Players and creators on PC wield more power than those on any other platform, which gets them more value for their money and effort, and invigorates gaming on the PC like nowhere else. It's no coincidence that most of gaming's new ideas, new technologies, and surprise hits all get their start on the PC. Denuvo and all other efforts by corporate rent-seekers to close the PC are poison to everyone who enjoys the benefits of gaming on an open platform.