Rime studio acknowledges technical issues and comments on Denuvo

After several years of anticipation, Grey Box's little-lost-boy simulator Rime released last week, and while it's good (if not great, according to our reviewer) some PC users have reported technical issues. This has prompted the game's lead producer Cody Bradley to address the problem on the studio's website, where he also commented on the inclusion of anti-piracy software Denuvo.

While Bradley believes only a small fraction of users have experienced problems with the game, the studio has identified some problem areas based on feedback. In particular, AMD RX 580 cards "appear to be having trouble in general", while GTX 1080 cards are "having problems with SSAA anti-aliasing".

"We've also had users report that switching the VSync setting to Double Buffering significantly boosted performance, especially on 900 series Nvidia cards," Bradley continued. The studio is working towards resolving all of these issues.

Meanwhile, after some customer backlash due to the inclusion of Denuvo anti-piracy software in Rime, Bradley was frank. "The fact of the matter is that we looked at the piracy rate on games that were very similar to RiME, and it scared us," he wrote.

"At the end of the day, our obligation as a publisher is to protect our development team’s intellectual property to the best of our ability. Right now, Denuvo is our only effective option."

On whether Denuvo was hindering the technical performance of the game, Bradley was similarly frank. "The only thing that Denuvo is currently doing for us is checking to make certain that Steam’s (or Origin’s) DRM is still attached to the game," he wrote. "There is a small performance hit associated with this, but at this time we do not believe it is causing the problems that are currently being reported. We might be wrong. We’re monitoring the situation."

That said, Bradley said that once the game is cracked the studio intends to remove Denuvo from the build. "Based on other titles, we expect the protection to last two weeks, maybe three at most. We have no intentions of patching a new version of Denuvo in at that time."

Shaun Prescott is the Australian editor of PC Gamer. With over ten years experience covering the games industry, his work has appeared on GamesRadar+, TechRadar, The Guardian, PLAY Magazine, the Sydney Morning Herald, and more. Specific interests include indie games, obscure Metroidvanias, speedrunning, experimental games and FPSs. He thinks Lulu by Metallica and Lou Reed is an all-time classic that will receive its due critical reappraisal one day.