from the he’s back department
Denuvo is back! While the company only garnered a single mention in 8 months so far in 2022, the once boasted anti-piracy DRM company made quite a splash in the years before. If you don’t want to go through dozens and dozens of posts about Denuvo, I can give you a quick breakdown. Denuvo DRM was once touted as a tool that would bring about “the end of video game piracy”, which was later defeated by cracking groups on the order of months, then weeks, then days, then hours. Publishers began removing DRM from games after release once they were cracked, and the company announced that it would switch to anti-cheat technology for online games. Since then, very little noise has been made by or about the company.
But he’s back! And it’s also back in the dumbest way possible, recently announcing that it had partnered with several game publishers to protect Nintendo Switch games from PC emulators.
Denuvo, the company best known for its much-criticized PC gaming DRM technology, has set its sights on a new scourge: Nintendo Switch piracy. The software maker announced during GamesCom 2022 on Wednesday that it will start selling a new product called Nintendo Switch Emulator Protection to prevent Switch games from being pirated on PC.
It does not appear to be associated with Nintendo on the initiative, which instead appears to be primarily aimed at third-party publishers of cross-platform games. “As with all other Denuvo solutions, the technology integrates seamlessly into the build toolchain without affecting the gaming experience. It then allows controls to be inserted into the code, which crashes the game on emulators,” the company wrote in a press release. In the past, however, Denuvo’s “controls” have been accused of making some games run worse.
Yes, it certainly has. And Denuvo later confirmed that he was working with publishers and not Nintendo directly, which was a huge surprise, if only because of Nintendo’s longstanding war against emulation websites.
So what’s wrong with Switch emulation? A big problem…if you think a group of mostly fans who have legally bought Switch games are the enemy. The average gamer won’t bother trying to figure out how to set up a Switch emulator on the kind of PC needed to run it and buy a console. The average player isn’t doing all that either. Y hack the Switch/ROM game to avoid paying anything. Some will, but not the majority.
Or, as Denuvo says, yes they will and all this fan talk is just an excuse for piracy.
As you know, getting rid of your purchased game for backup purposes is a long-standing pirate argument that is simply used to justify piracy. Most of the players use emulators with ROMs from pirated sources and do not download them themselves. And if they download it themselves, they’ll need a jailbroken console to do so.
Appointment needed, obviously. Also, I would say that Denuvo is working with game publishers to prevent customers from taking actions with their games that are potentially legal. Which seems pretty shitty and anti-consumerist.
I’ll also point out that given Denuvo’s impressive crash rate and speed in the past, we can probably start a timer to see how long the company’s anti-emulation DRM lasts before being defeated by cracking groups once again.
Filed Under: copyright, drm, emulators, piracy, videogames
Companies: denuvo, nintendo
