Games

Anti-Piracy Company Denuvo Wants to Make Switch Emulation a Lot Harder

Denuvo is known for its PC DRM tech, which it now brings to the Nintendo Switch to delay emulation.
Ma
Screenshot by Nintendo.

Anti-piracy company Denuvo announced a new technology designed to make upcoming Nintendo Switch games more difficult to emulate on PC. This move, which comes in the wake of Nintendo’s exceptionally punitive court case against Gary Bowser, could make pirating and emulation of Nintendo games more difficult, but is unlikely to stop the practice.

Denuvo is best known for its DRM (Digital Rights Management) anti-piracy tools, which have thus far been primarily designed for PC games. The company has a reputation for extending the time it takes for a given game to be pirated, at the expense of a game’s overall technical performance. This was most notable with TEKKEN 7, in which case the game’s director acknowledged that diminished PC performance was on account of Denuvo’s DRM process. These performance concerns, in addition to the kernel level access required by the software (which makes some worried about the security of their PCs), has earned the company a lot of ire in virtually every gaming community it comes into contact with.

Advertisement

This new tool is not designed to prevent ROMs from being pirated on Nintendo Switches, but prevent their emulation on PC which has become increasingly easy in recent years. Metroid Dread, for example, was cracked within a day of release, allowing some to play it on PC for free, instead of purchasing the game. It is worth noting, however, that despite the claims of many companies, it’s hard to prove that pirated and emulated copies of games directly translate to lost sales and, anecdotally, piracy can directly translate to sales on their intended platforms through word of mouth endorsement and the ability to demo games on an emulator in order to determine what is worth buying at full price.

Emulators and ROMs also play an essential role in maintaining gaming history, as they allow games to be preserved away from storefronts which companies can shut down on a whim. The Nintendo 3DS eshop, for example, is currently in the midst of a prolonged death in which credit card payments are being turned off in preparation for the store’s inevitable death. This will prevent 3DS owners from purchasing digital games, including download-only titles. Emulators and ROMs allow for copies of these games to be preserved and accessible by a future audience.

“Software publishers and Denuvo take great care to deliver the best gaming experience," told Waypoint. "The protection is designed not to affect the gamer’s experience, and it does not have any in-game performance impact. It is the same for this new solution when protection is only active in non-performance critical code parts.”

Denuvo’s software is designed to delay emulation, not to stop it altogether, the company said: “The situation with piracy on Switch is similar to the PC. It’s an ongoing development to make it harder for cracks to happen, extending the revenue window for publishers and keeping games fair for all players.” The company has had success previously in significantly extending the time it takes to crack games like Assassin’s Creed Origins, which is the ultimate goal of most anti-piracy measures. Denuvo’s tools attempt to protect games during their early release windows, when sales are at their highest, with the acknowledgment that they’ll likely be cracked later down the line.

Nintendo, with its massive catalog of exclusive games and ever-diminishing ability to access them, has been the target of emulators for a very, very long time and will only continue to be so going forward. Only time will tell if this new partnership with Denuvo will have any impact on its thriving emulation scene.

Nintendo did not provide Waypoint with comment in time for publication.