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DRM Emulation (Games) Nintendo

Denuvo Security Is Now On Switch, Including New Tech To Block PC Switch Emulation (videogameschronicle.com) 57

Posted by BeauHD from the thanks-but-no-thanks dept.
Denuvo has become the first security partner to be added to the Nintendo Developer Portal. According to Video Games Chronicle, Switch developers can use Denuvo's tools for their games to block users from playing them on PC emulators. From the report: "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. "By blocking unauthorized emulations on PC, studios are able to increase their revenue during the game launch window, which is the most important period for monetization. The Nintendo Switch Emulator Protection will ensure that anyone wishing to play the game has to buy a legitimate copy. As with all other Denuvo solutions, the technology integrates seamlessly into the build toolchain with no impact on the gaming experience. It then allows for the insertion of checks into the code, which blocks gameplay on emulators."
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Denuvo Security Is Now On Switch, Including New Tech To Block PC Switch Emulation More

Denuvo Security Is Now On Switch, Including New Tech To Block PC Switch Emulation

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  • The switch is already performance challenged in some games, now they're going to add the performance killer Denuvo to games? "...with no impact on the gaming experience." Bull, Denuvo games run like garbage half the time.

    • Denuvo has multiple 'levels' of protection. The lowest level doesn't actually have a performance hit, but it's also not much better than the fig leaf that is Steam's copy protection. If that's what they're using, you'll see maybe a 24-48 hour delay on cracking Switch games. If they're using the full Monty however the slowdown is going to be hilarious.

    • Unless Denuvo for Switch also intends to detect things like jailbroken Switches and pirated copies of the game itself, there's no need for them to do Denuvo for Switch like they do PC, a more open platform. It sounds like their primary objective is to make games unplayable in emulators. It's possible people who jailbreak Switches aren't as much of a concern.

      • Unless Denuvo for Switch also intends to detect things like jailbroken Switches and pirated copies of the game itself

        Not going to be successful long term. Original run Switch hardware is vulnerable to the Fusée Gelée exploit, which allows direct hardware access during bootrom execution. This is the entire reason why Nintendo is screwed with the Switch and cannot stop piracy at all on the platform. There's nothing for them to fall back to. Sure they can release a new hardware revision, but short of rendering all of the currently released Switch models unable to decrypt all newly released Switch games by using de

  • Cracked in 3, 2, 1... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Friday August 25, 2023 @07:51PM (#63797598)

    Let's be honest here, these things never really stopped people from copying. All they did was to delay the inevitable. And while this is enough for many studios because they know that 99% of their sales happen during the first few days (but let's not even think about talking lowering the copyright protection duration back from "eternal" to something reasonable), the legitimate customer is suffering the side effects and annoyance from these protection schemes that border on being rootkits (and sometimes they leap over that border quite blatantly) while people copying and cracking those games suffer no such problems.

    Why they try to compete with "free" by making their product actually worth less to their customer is something I don't quite get...

    • ban Smash modding as well + maybe steaming of non big N approved evnets

    • gives Nintendo even more DMCA AMMO stop fan work / mods!

    • You've already answered your last question. If Denuvo can make "free" unavailable for the first couple of months (aka the months the game makes most of its revenue) then the publisher won't have to compete with "free" and customers will have to jump through whatever hoops the publisher wants them to jump through in order to play the game. Yes, I know, you won't buy Denuvo-encumbered games, but others will.

      This comes from someone criticizing the futility of DRM for linear media such as video and music (I
      • Their logical fallacy, though, is assuming that preventing the free option will get any measurable number of people to buy the product instead. That doesn't happen. Half of pirates couldn't afford the games anyway, and the other half aren't going to consider non-free options, they'll just go play a game that they *were* able to pirate. I'm not saying that makes it less of a bad or immoral thing, but the idea that preventing piracy leads to increased sales is an easily disproven myth, which DRM vendors are j
        • Let's be real, some of those pirates would've been customers. I've never owned a genuine PS1 game in my life but did buy some GameBoy and GameBoy Advance games because I had no choice. Of course when it comes to movies and music (where the content will soon hit free-to-air) it's different.

          • The question is, though, how many people who would have bought the game didn't because of the rootkit in turn? Because there are a few PC games that I really, really wanted but when I saw what copy protection they used, I had to abstain from buying it.

      • It's not even a couple of months. Unfortunately I have way, way more insight into this than I'd like to admit.

        We're talking days here. But yes, that is actually enough of an incentive for people to buy games because they get a head start to their competitors. But here's the rub: These people then still download the crack and use it because that actually improves performance and removes the rootkit from their system.

        So I guess everyone's happy. The user is happy because they can play the game unencumbered, t

        • Denuvo has multiple levels, from "hobbyist can break it in a few hours" to "it takes a dedicated releaser 1 month or more to break it". There is only one releaser cracking the highest tiers of Denuvo currently and it takes them at least a month to crack each game.
    • It happens because these deals happen exclusively on the "C level", where the people making these decisions have absolutely no clue about how the technology works, or the dynamics of the market. The DRM manufacturers aren't the only ones exploiting this. The key is to avoid any employee with technical knowledge to ever be part of the meetings until everything is already decided. And these companies are *very* good at that. Trust that any developers, project managers, market researchers, etc. at the studios

      • Doesn't work in the company I work for. ANYTHING that has an impact on security and/or our technical sector WILL be signed off by the CISO. And we have a CISO that knows he doesn't know jack shit about current security (frankly, that guy is awesome in his field of security management and I sure as fuck won't want his job, but he's not a security technician, and he knows that really well), so he will dump that on one of us. With his 100% backing. So if one of us says "no fucking way", it's the CISO saying "n

    • All they did was to delay the inevitable.

      And even when the inevitable happens, the DRM stays in place for several more years until it is switched off and is taken away forever... at least from the people who paid for it.

      The only way DRM could possibly be done "right" is if it expires. Publishers are too egotistical and jealous to do that, so piracy is here to stay.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Let's be honest here, these things never really stopped people from copying. All they did was to delay the inevitable. And while this is enough for many studios because they know that 99% of their sales happen during the first few days (but let's not even think about talking lowering the copyright protection duration back from "eternal" to something reasonable), the legitimate customer is suffering the side effects and annoyance from these protection schemes that border on being rootkits (and sometimes they leap over that border quite blatantly) while people copying and cracking those games suffer no such problems.

      Why they try to compete with "free" by making their product actually worth less to their customer is something I don't quite get...

      It's not even delaying the pirates.

      It's a protection racket from Denuvo, pure and simple. It's causing a loss in sales as Denuvo tried to sue Steam to get them to remove the little yellow sign that says "this product contains Denuvo", usually followed with a warning about activations. It's enough to make a lot of people think, "we'll I'm better off spending my money somewhere else".

  • I bet that stings (Score:3)

    by WolfgangVL ( 3494585 ) on Friday August 25, 2023 @08:29PM (#63797674)

    Steamdeck played Tears of the Kingdom better than the switch 2 days after official launch. I bet the playerbase dropped like a rock when the Linus tech tips trolled Nintendo with a blatant "This way to piracy" lawyerbait youtube video.

    When your business is information technology and gaming, and your consumers range from toddlers all the way to state-of-the-art pushing hardware security engineers, trotting out an army of lawyers to shutdown good natured fan culture and suing people into the poorhouse is not soon forgotten.

    Nintendo can't not do something about the ease and quality of which their hardware is emulated, but I don't think even Mario and friends can sell very much Denuvo-ratfucked shovelware and N already released the big exclusives.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Nintendo's OS is copyright protected. That's the stick they beat emulators with. It's not like back in the day when consoles had no OS of their own, just a cartridge slot that inserted the game into the machine's memory space at the address were the CPU started executing after reset.

      On some machines, emulators are able to replace the minimal OS. But newer systems like the Switch are complex, and the only option is to pirate the OS image itself. It's good that you can, from a preservation perspective, but Ni

      • Then provide the emulator without the OS. This has been the case for quite a while, with PS2 emulators requiring from the user to provide PS2 "BIOS files" (aka the PS2's OS) in order to work.
        • They already do. In fact the "OS" used by the emulators is reverse engineered. It's called Atmosphere [github.com] and it's also used by CFW users on original hardware.
    • I don't care if it was limited to kid games that beep and zap, but this "enshitification" is now affecting everything, including the physical world. And I wonder how bad things have to get before people reach for the torches and pitchforks. "Thank you for serving me dogshit for breakfast. Please sir, can I have some more?" Where does it end?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        It does end when average people begin to understand what is going on. That basically never happens.

        • If only social media could be used to in..nevermind. Lol catz and drama (Francine called Suzy a "ho"? Tell me more!) until life crashes down completely all around everyone.

  • Nintendo is free to do whatever they want to trash their own brand. I'll just play other games. Plenty of games to be played on other platforms and on the PC/Mac.

    • Not possible.

      a) people aren't informed enough to vote with their wallet
      b) people don't care enough.

      • Re:Vote with your wallet (Score:4, Funny)

        by Z80a ( 971949 ) on Friday August 25, 2023 @11:02PM (#63797896)

        c) when people DO vote with their wallet, but in silence, the person directly responsible for the fuck up will convince the higher ups that the game failed to sell because it lacked even more of the things the consumers hated about it

      • "b) people don't care enough." Parents buy the Switch to keep little Chuckums quiet so he won't go WAA. They are the majority of buyers. They don't care about DRM or even know what DRM. As long as the Switch bleeps and bloops as it's expected to do, everything's fine. Because the Switch keeps Chuckums on his best behavior, there won't be much voting with the wallet, certainly not enough to make any difference.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Indeed. The average person is clueless and stupid (and clueless about being stupid, see Dunning&Kruger). That is why voting basically never works, be it wallet or ballot.

    • If companies are able to sell things with DRM on them, which might suddenly decide they're not going to work in situations where they should, without having to plaster giant warnings of this possibility over them, that's fraudulent, and hence a ballot box issue. Products must be suitable for the purposes advertised, with no nasty surprises deliberately inserted.

  • I mean I genuinely thought the Switch's processor would be too weak to run Denuvo. God knows it cripples performance on some pretty high and gaming PCs.

    But really this is just stupid. The market for Switch emulated games ranges from nothing to LOL-fuck-no. No sale has ever been lost because someone emulates a Switch game.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      The market for developers that can be easily scared by "piracy kill sales" horror stories is huge.
      Denuvo is not much different from mcafee.

      • Not the developers, the executives. The developers themselves roll their eyes when told to use these tools by the higher ups.

        In an ideal world developers would refuse to work for such idiots and go build their own companies, after all, it isn't like big software companies involve anything more than a workstation per programmer, which can be their own personal machines, and a rack of servers. Join into a cooperative, contract some personnel to manage the bureaucratic and commercial side of things as employee

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Sure. But apparently the crooks at Denuvo manage to convince Nintendo otherwise. That is their whole business model.

  • I don't see the problem here (Score:3)

    by Can'tNot ( 5553824 ) on Friday August 25, 2023 @10:47PM (#63797876)
    As long as there's no network requirement, this just doesn't matter. DRM on the PC can be problematic when you have a hardware or software configuration that the DRM doesn't recognize, but on a console where all of those factors are known this seems like a non-issue. Even potential performance problems that other people here have mentioned, those also are known and can be accounted for if necessary. You can scale down the DRM nonsense if your game can't handle the overhead, it's not like it's one-size-fits-all.

    Obviously this won't go well if you have lazy or inept or overworked developers, but if that's the case then the game is already shit. So that doesn't matter.
    • If only this kind of energy went into making this world a slightly more bearable place to live for the common folk rather than trying to than milspec protect bloop bloop games...

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Malays2b0wen ( 10422574 )
      My beef is even something as simple as Scrabble require an always on internet connection to even do something ss simple as play an 'offline' solo game. Whether for DRM purposes or not. Not all subway tunnels have internet access. This particular problem was solved by using a Palm Pilot emulator and an old cracked copy of Handmark Scrabble. I really have no desire to be an opponent to old grandmas so online multiplayer isn't even a thought to me.

      • Agreed. StarCraft II was the final game I bought from Blizzard for this reason. I hadn't played it in a while, and then decided to fire it up on a business trip. It forgot its permission to run, requiring me to go online during a transatlantic flight. Impossible so I deleted it and never bought anything else from them.

        Turns out I didn't miss much.

        • "It forgot its permission to run, requiring me to go online during a transatlantic flight." Wait until there is a massive hack attack, or that sunspot that is in the news causes the internet to go down for an extended period of time. That will wake people up to why it's not OK to accept items that should work offline being gatekept by online servers.
  • This company's claims sounds like a challenge. Expect this 'protection' to be broken in a month or two.

  • Generally (Score:4, Interesting)

    by The MAZZTer ( 911996 ) <megazzt AT gmail DOT com> on Friday August 25, 2023 @11:22PM (#63797916) Homepage

    Generally this is done by experimenting with top emulators to see what sort of obscure things they can do which deviate behavior in emulators vs the Switch, and try to detect that in the game to see if they are running in an emulator.

    It remains to be seen if emulator developers will prioritize fixes (or merging PRs implementing fixes) that make the emulators behave like the real console in these edge cases.

    Of course the most effective way Denuvo could work is to test things that the emulator can't emulate 100% accurately without huge performance penalties, especially things that are "good enough" to usually not need that amount of precision. For example minuta of the specific GPU the Switch uses.

    If the rumors of a Switch 2 are true, and it turns out to be backwards compatible, there's also a fun risk that Denuvo may not work properly on it without an update. And depending on which games get the update or not... well it could potentially affect legitimate customers which is pretty self-defeating for this sort of thing.

    • >it could potentially affect legitimate customers which is pretty self-defeating for this sort of thing

      DRM negatively affecting paying customers in a mostly-fruitless attempt to stop non-paying customers has been an acceptable outcome for as long as I can recall. All the way back to my C=64 days.

  • 'no impact' (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sarusa ( 104047 ) on Saturday August 26, 2023 @01:07AM (#63798030)

    'the technology integrates seamlessly into the build toolchain with no impact on the gaming experience'

    No impact my ass. They continue to peddle this lie, which they can justify because if you use the very lowest level of protection there is no subsequent impact. But it's easily removed by crackers.

    If you want the highest level of protection you are invoking a highly CPU draining routine every single frame, and the Switch is at the very end of its performance limits. It could not keep up with Tears of the Kingdom - that game could not for the life of it maintain 30 FPS (which used to be Nintendo's secondary standard after they abandoned 60 FPS) and regularly had giant performance dips.

    There's no such thing as a free lunch.

    • Re:'no impact' (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Sarusa ( 104047 ) on Saturday August 26, 2023 @02:08AM (#63798082)

      Actually, sorry for replying to my own comment, but it really helps if you understand how Denuvo works. You get to choose how often to call it and how much crap it does when you call it.

      So in the lightest form it can do a verification of files/crcs or in-memory crc at startup to see if there's been any tampering. This will have no impact on later performance, just loading performance, but is easily cracked. It's what Denuvo uses to claim there is 'no performance impact', but is not what they suggest.

      In the worst form it can do this every single frame, reducing your frame rate to a slideshow.

      Between the two you can do things like a quick memory scan every frame or every second or so looking for executable tampering, and this sort of thing is what most games are doing. It absolutely comes with a performance cost. Some games back it off to every couple seconds, but this causes (surprise) micro-stuttering.

      It is impossible to have Denuvo with useful protection and no impact on frame rates unless the game is so CPU unbound that you just dedicate a core to the DRM. Most games that have Denuvo removed have significant performance increases.

  • Only unauthorised emulation? (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Cward ( 10374574 ) on Saturday August 26, 2023 @02:02AM (#63798078)
    In most of the world, software developers cannot legally prevent third parties from writing compatible software programs capable of correctly executing game code. Denuvo is claiming that it will prevent unauthorised emulation, so does that mean they will provide keys to allow emulation where it is legal? I doubt it.

    This is yet another DRM solution designed to make piracy a more attractive option for the masses.

  • Seriously. What are these people doing?

  • Deserve the misery (Score:3)

    by NotEmmanuelGoldstein ( 6423622 ) on Saturday August 26, 2023 @05:41AM (#63798294)

    ... playing them on PC emulators.

    Translation: We demand our customers buy one copy of our software for every device they own.

    While they have every right to demand this, this lack of portability was down-voted 10 years ago. If Switch owners have the stupidity to buy software with such traditional restrictions, they deserve the misery they get.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      ... playing them on PC emulators.

      Translation: We demand our customers buy one copy of our software for every device they own.

      While they have every right to demand this, this lack of portability was down-voted 10 years ago. If Switch owners have the stupidity to buy software with such traditional restrictions, they deserve the misery they get.

      Denuvo is even worse than that on PC, they will often have activation limits to ensure you can't install it on too many devices even if all those devices are legally yours.

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