An interview on Ars Technica titled "Denuvo wants to convince you its DRM isn’t "evil'" chats with Steeve Huin, COO of Irdeto, owner of the Denuvo DRM software. The conversation acknowledges the distrust the gaming community has for Denuvo, but ignores the complaints of legitimate users and blames pirates. "In the pirating/cracking community, we're seen as evil because we're helping DRM exist" Huin explains. "And we're ensuring people make money out of games." Ars notes the truth of the latter point: "Despite the very public performance concerns, major game publishers have continued to support Denuvo over the years for a very simple reason: It delays the release of piracy-enabling cracks—and sometimes stops them completely." Legitimate customers counter this by complaining that they are being punished for the misdeeds of others. The thrust of the interview is to reassure gamers that Denuvo DRM has zero impact. When confronted with examples where game performance demonstrably improved after Denuvo was dropped, Huin says this is comparing apples to oranges, saying "gamers [almost] never get access to the same version of [a game] protected and unprotected. There might be over the lifetime of the game a protected and unprotected version, but these are not comparable because these are different builds over six months, many bug fixes, etc., which could make it better or worse." The solution he proposes is to allow "independent benchmarks" using a test case Denuvo will supply:

After years of public uproar over Denuvo's alleged performance impact, though, Huin said he knows much of the gaming community won't take him at his word. "Our voice is unfortunately not sufficient to convince people because we're not trusted in their mind as a starting point in that debate," he said.

To get around that mistrust, Huin said Irdeto is working on a program that would provide two nearly identical versions of a game to trusted media outlets: one with Denuvo protection and one without. After that program rolls out, hopefully sometime in the next few months, Huin hopes independent benchmarks will allow the tech press to "see for yourself that the performance is comparable, identical... and that would provide something that would hopefully be trusted by the community."