In addition to pirates, Denuvo will also deal with whistleblowers

The makers of anti-piracy software Denuvo recently unveiled new TraceMark for Games technology that will help game developers track down data leaks. Denuvo is best known for its DRM software used in several recent and upcoming PC games such as Dragon's Dogma 2, FC 25, Street Fighter 6, Star Wars Jedi Survivor, Mortal Kombat 1, Dead Space Remake and practically all other AAA games.

Denuvo digital rights management (DRM) software was originally released in 2014 and then acquired by Irdeto in 2018. The software quickly became quite controversial, as Denuva was quite difficult to bypass and effectively prevented people from pirating and also cheating within games, and was also accused of negatively affecting the performance of those games. Recently, Irdeto has expanded its reach beyond PC gaming. Last year was the first time we got Switch games protected by Denuvo.

While they are successfully dealing with pirates, they have also focused their efforts on whistleblowers. TraceMark is a watermarking technology that allows developers to add unique and invisible identifiers to specific files. In the event that games or certain files were to go online, these identifiers could be used by developers to identify who the whistleblower was in that case, possibly an internal employee, an influencer, a YouTube creator, or someone else. The company is convinced that it is a huge step forward for the protection of sensitive information in the field of gaming. Data is especially sensitive right before a game's release, when the developer starts sharing it with a smaller group of users, either for testing or preparing content for release.

Their primary software will always conflict with at least one group of users. At least at first glance, TraceMark works positively for the entire gaming industry. Data leakage and theft can leave behind serious consequences for the developer and the studio. There have been more and more of these cases in recent years. Information about the location of Fallout 4, as well as the cast itself, was revealed by the online portal Kotaku, a few months before the release of The Last of Us Part 2, details about the story got online, two years ago, more than 90 escaped from the hands of the Rockstar Games studio footage of the latest game GTA 6, and developer Insomniac lost even more: 1 TB of data on all planned projects, an early version of the game Wolverine, personal data of employees and more.

In cases where the culprit was a cyber attack, even TraceMark technology is unlikely to solve the developers' conundrum. It is more intended for planned data leakage of those who got early access to sensitive materials.