The first of the tools Denuvo is offering to Switch developers is Nintendo Switch Emulator Protection, a “revolutionary technology to protect games launching on Nintendo Switch from piracy”.
According to Denuvo, the new tech can be applied to Switch games to block the ability to play them on PC emulators.
“Even if a game is protected against piracy on its PC version, the version released on Nintendo Switch can be emulated from day one and played on PC, therefore bypassing the strong protections offered on the PC version,” the company says. “This can happen with any of the numerous games available on Nintendo Switch.
Surely a 1:1 emulator would just run DRM as expected and it would never know… Feels like it may stop day1 piracy via emulators but anything beyond I’m sure would be patched.
Emulators are generally written to play the games the best they can, not to be an exact replica of the original hardware. Getting stuff like timings and generally ignored side effects right can be quite a pain to write code against. I don’t think many emulators exist that will actively try to hide that they’re emulators, unless games try to detect specific emulators (after which the specific detection mechanism gets patched out).
That said, I think it should be possible to emulate a Switch close enough to real hardware that Denuvo’s product will just think it’s a real device, unless they can force you to update the game very often so they can mess around with their emulator detection.
Honestly, I’m not sure. I don’t have a lot of experience with PC gaming (or its related piracy), but there seems to be a lot of drama in the pirate community due to the difficulty in bypassing Denuvo.
In this particular case, a good Switch emulator may be enough to bypass it; but my guess is it’ll be more complicated and resource taxing on the Switch than a simple hardware check.
IMO the worst part about Denuvo is that it just ruins any game they add it to by being a massive resource hog.
Yeah, and switch sometimes stutter too already without Denuvo. Games are already being pushed to their limit on the switch just trying to hit 30 fps whole not even targeting 1080p in the more heavy games.
We’ve been down this road before. It just takes a few determined hackers to find a workaround. I can’t wait to see what their solution would be.
The general solution to this problem, is just to remove the DRM, and then run it.
I hope that the switch version would be easier to bypass as there’s no way they’re going to force you to connect to the internet to verify anything like the do on the PC.
Yuzu (and Ryukahr) are not 1:1 emulators though, and they aren’t attempting to. Attempting 1:1 emulation of the hardware is only feasible with very old hardware like the NES or whatever, where modern hardware doesn’t have a problem simulating every detail of the CPU. Yuzu doesn’t try to simulate the Tegra SoC that’s in the Switch, I think it works by transpiling game code and hooking into system calls and whatnot, similar to what Proton does on Linux (only probably more complex).
If the Denuvo team studied how these emulators work well, it’s probably very hard to effectively defeat Denuvo DRM in general (as opposed to on a per-game basis).