It wasn’t all good news at GamesCom 2023, Irdeto caused a lot of controversy with the introduction of two technologies that will make it very difficult for PC modders, Denuvo Unreal Engine Protection and Integrity Verification technology, both integrated into the Denuvo anti-piracy solution.

The company markets both features as “A new level of gaming security”and he points out that both can be used together or independently in Denuvo to boost protection and, as expected, explained what exactly they consist of.

Denuvo Unreal Engine Protection aims to prevent “malicious users” from tampering with games created using said graphics engine. It is easy to integrate at the binary level into games and can thwart data extraction attempts while creating barriers against cheaters, hackers and fraudsters. also prevents game modification.

Integrity verification enables developers verify the integrity of your own game codeand plays an important role in its static and dynamic protection. This feature theoretically prevents attackers from tampering with game code and is also easy to integrate.

It is clear that both technologies have an important value in terms of protecting games and stopping the use of cheats, but in the end it will also negatively affect the modding community, because, as we can read on the Irdeto website, both prevent actions that are key for creating mods.

On the other hand, it should be considered that these two new functions could eventually have significant impact on game performance. Add to that the fact that the Unreal Engine 5 graphics engine is very demanding and that it is not fully optimized at the CPU level, and we have an explosive cocktail that could have disastrous consequences in the final.

We will see which companies decide to take advantage of these new features and what kind of impact they will really have, although looking at what has happened with Denuvo in recent years, I am already telling you that nothing good can be expected. You already know what I think personally, I think so the most effective way to combat piracy is to publish well-customized gamesoptimized and polished and at more affordable prices.