The cost of Denuvo – Leaked documents reveals how much Crytek paid for Denuvo

Thanks to leaked documents from Crytek, as posted by FCKDRM on Reddit, Denuvo’s pricing structure has been revealed. If these documents are accurate, Crytek was willing to pat €140,000 to add Denuvo protection to Crysis Remastered for 12 months, though this fee could be increased or decreased under certain conditions. 

According to these leaked documents, Crytek would have to pay additional fees if they were to release Crysis Remastered on additional storefronts, forcing the company to pay $10,000 if they released the game on Steam or other digital storefronts. After 12 months of sales, Crytek would also need to pay €2,000 each month after their initial 12-month of usage. If this is accurate, we now know the reason why many games remove Denuvo one year after launch.    

Denuvo’s services extend beyond their anti-tamper technology, with the company offering its users piracy monitoring, early leak detection, manual profiling to ensure that Denuvo is performance-friendly, and other useful services. Even so, Denuvo represents a huge cost to developers, especially for lower-cost games like Crysis Remastered. 

If we assume that Crytek paid €140,000 for Denuvo protection with Crysis Remastered and use Crysis Remastered’s standard unit price of €30 on the Epic Games Store, Crytek would need to sell around 5,000 PC copies of Crysis Remastered to offset the cost of Denuvo alone. While the original PC version of Crysis was one of the most pirated games of that era, it is hard to know if adding Denuvo to Crysis Remastered would result in enough additional sales to be worth the cost of Denuvo’s services.