Frequently Asked Questions

We are built for indie developers and mid-sized studios. If you can afford the multi-six-figure price tag of legacy enterprise DRM, you should probably go buy that. We provide accessible, flat-rate protection for those who need to protect their launch window revenue without compromising their players' experience.

Yes. Empirical data shows that the first 12 weeks are critical for a game's total lifetime revenue. If protection holds for at least 12 weeks, the financial impact of piracy is effectively neutralized. Tessera provides that critical revenue shield when it matters most.

Study: DOI: 10.1016/j.entcom.2024.100885

Yes! The combination of no runtime code overhead, combined with our specialized codecs, means most studios who use Tessera, at worst, see no impact. In most cases, developers actually report faster load times and improved FPS due to our highly performant asset packaging and streamlined delivery pipeline.

While the first 12 weeks are critical for revenue (anti-piracy), the long-term value of Tessera is Asset Sovereignty. Even after a game's primary sales curve has plateaued, your creative work—textures, models, and audio—remains a target for automated AI scraping and unauthorized training sets. Tessera ensures your proprietary art remains encrypted and protected from mass extraction, regardless of the game's age.

Legacy DRM wraps your entire game executable in a virtual machine layer, which translates every instruction at runtime. This wraps the CPU, poisoning its cache and causing unpredictable frame drops. Tessera inverts this: we protect the assets and leave your game's code untouched. Because the CPU never has to "de-obfuscate" the game's logic, your players get their full, native performance with zero FPS loss.

Sunsetting is our commitment to game longevity. It is a planned path to remove DRM entirely at the end of a game's commercial life. This protects you (the developer) from being tied to our infrastructure forever, and it protects your players from losing access to the games they bought. We believe games should be playable decades after their servers go dark.

Because we do not wrap your executable or monitor your game's memory for code changes, most script extenders, function hooks, and community patches work without any modification. We protect your art, not your players' ability to experiment.

You can transition your game to a DRM-free state at any time with a simple relink to our provided stub library. There is no proprietary wrapping to undo and no complex binary surgery required.