But Huin stressed to Ars that he sees Denuvo as a positive force for the gaming community as a whole. “Anti-piracy technologies is to the benefit of the game publishers, [but also] is of benefit to the players in that it protects the [publisher’s] investment and it means the publishers can then invest in the next game,” he said. “But people typically don’t think enough of that.”

Alternatively, if everyone pirates a game that shipped with Denuvo instead of buying it, publishers will see that Denuvo is a detriment to sales, will stop putting it into their games, and your future gaming experience will increase because you won’t have shitty performance on launch day anymore.

So pirating a game that ships with Denuvo is good for consumers, and practically a moral obligation for anybody that likes video games.

And run by a guy notorious for not paying his bills

Flatbuffers! It’s like protocol buffers, but much leaner. It was actually specifically designed for games, and meets all your requirements.

The only challenge is that, like protocol buffers, it requires an extra compilation step and involves code generation. Depending on your build system, that could be a challenge.