Keeping the fight fair - busting the myths about anti-cheat

If you’ve ever played a PC game that has a competitive element, you’ve probably played against a cheater. Whether it’s that player flying around at an impossible speed, or that bullet that felt a little too precise. Cheating has become one of the largest issues that publishers are facing today.

Three years ago, the Denuvo team set out to build a best-of-breed solution to bring fairness back to gaming. We worked together with your favorite major game publishers and studios who field-tested our Anti-Cheat solution and for more than two years, have been putting it through rigorous testing to identify any issues that might be detrimental to gameplay.

As Denuvo Anti-Cheat grows in popularity, we’re seeing a lot of discussion around how our anti-cheat operates. We’d like to address some of the concerns expressed by the community and detail how we’re working tirelessly along with top publishers to detect cheaters, helping to create a safe, secure and fun environment for players.

We know that our detection methods produce accurate results and do not have a perceivable effect in performance. Don’t take just our word for it. Check out these common myths and the hard-cold facts that shoot ‘em down!

  1. Denuvo Anti-Tamper, Denuvo Anti-Cheat, it’s all the same!
    Denuvo Anti-Tamper makes it harder for pirates to crack existing DRM like Steam, Origin, and the Epic Game Store because Anti-Tamper doesn’t prevent game modding, and it is easy to cheat in Anti-Tamper protected games. Denuvo Anti-Cheat provides real-time detection of multiplayer aimbots, overlays and maphacks that use drivers, hypervisors and other common cheat methods. It’s a solution that protects eSports and multiplayer games from cheating through detection only. The two solutions have little overlap.
  2. It’s monitoring and collecting my data 24/7!
    The Denuvo Anti-Cheat solution runs only when your game is running, and it does not collect any personally identifiable information. It collects information on how the OS interacts with the game and sends the information to Amazon-hosted servers for cheat detection. That is all it does. Denuvo Anti-Cheat only detects cheats – then game publishers decide how to respond to the cheaters found.
  3. It’s a malware, rootkit, spyware or otherwise malicious code.
    The company’s driver received certification from renowned kernel security researchers, completed rigorous whitebox and blackbox audits and was penetration-tested by independent cheat developers. Unlike existing anti-cheats, Denuvo Anti-Cheat does not stream shell code from the web, which means that, if compromised, attackers can’t send down arbitrary malware to gamers’ machines. Denuvo Anti-Cheat makes no effort to hide itself, asks for your permission to be installed, and can be uninstalled in one click.
  4. You don’t need kernel-mode.
    We understand running the driver component in kernel-mode can raise concerns, and that some of you want to know more about the tech behind Denuvo Anti-Cheat.  Kernel-level access is needed in order to effectively detect cheaters and is why the world most popular games like Fortnite, Apex Legends, Valorant, and PlayerUnkown’s Battlegrounds use kernel-mode anti-cheat solutions. There are many risks associated with kernel-mode drivers, like blue screens, and if we could avoid running in the kernel to offer an effective anti-cheat, we would.
  5. Your Anti-Cheat affects performance! It causes the blue screen of death!
    The Denuvo Anti-Cheat solution does not interfere with the normal operation of the OS, and based on our experience and independent testing, it does not cause errors or reduce stability to system performance. More often than not, performance issues are related to other code updates that are usually launched with the anti-cheat and are not directly related to the program itself. Running any additional software, like an anti-cheat, requires system resources, but the resources used by Denuvo Anti-Cheat are hundreds of times less than having a blank tab open in your internet browser.

Here at Denuvo, we’re players just like you, and we understand the concerns around installing programs with kernel-mode access. Our goal is to help publishers protect the competitive integrity of the game without compromising the personal privacy of the players, and to make sure gamers have an enjoyable, fair and fun opportunity to play the games they love. As always, please continue to give feedback via our social channels and players forums. While we might not be able to directly respond, you can rest assured that these messages are being read and relayed to the team every day.

For technical or corporate inquiries, feel free to reach out to via anticheat@denuvo.com 

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