Irdeto, developers of the heavily malignedDenuvoDRM, continue to pop up in the headlines— this time, by debuting a new game watermarking system during the 2024 Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) in hopes of putting an end to today’s climate of high-fidelity game leaks during pre-release periods.
Now, while Irdeto’s Denuvo DRM is quite rightfully disliked due to its negative gaming performance impacts and occasional tendency to break mods or other factors of the experience for paying customers, TraceMark at least sounds like something not likely to make the gaming experience any worse. Not by itself, anyway— though it seems highly probable that any game using TraceMark for Games during development will likely also use Denuvo’s proper DRM come launch time, which is a worst-case scenario for DRM critics.
So, how does “TraceMark for Gaming” actually work? According to Irdeto, TraceMark enables precise tracing of any leaked material back to its source, thanks to visible or invisible watermarks that serve as identifiers. According to them, these should still be detectable even after an image has been cropped, compressed, blurred, etc. Of course, Irdeto recommends using Denuvo Anti-Tamper DRM alongside TraceMark for Gaming during the development process, hoping for a “one-click solution that will discourage content and game leaks.”
For the most part, this news isn’t that bad—developers are well within their rights to keep their games confidential, and we’ve seen many major-profile leaks in the past few years that mainly only served to force game developers and publishers' hands. Fighting this issue may involve a more widespread adoption of Denuvo, though, which no PC gamer in their right mind will be happy about.
Life will get much more complicated for video game leakers, courtesy of every gamer’s favorite DRM provider. As a silver lining for those unruly leakers, the old classic leaking methods of “bigfoot photography” will return to the forefront in hopes of avoiding hidden, watermarked identifiers.
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Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.
