Denuvo coming to Nintendo Switch

Digital security company Irdeto has announced plans to have its anti-piracy software and DRM Denuvo provide coverage for Nintendo Switch games. 

From Irdeto’s point of view, most PC games currently have protection against piracy, but when they move to Switch, the games are quickly emulated and played, ironically, on the PC. Denuvo plans to block all emulation using their new product, Nintendo Switch Emulator Protection. Their website minces no words about it:

“Emulating any Nintendo Switch game on a PC is easy. And there are almost 4,500 of them available at present. Some gamers emulate titles on their release day, playing them without spending a penny.

By protecting your game with our solution, you force all players to buy it.”

Nintendo itself has taken a hard stance on piracy, successfully suing and shutting down websites that hosted ROMs of its pirated games. But thus far, there has been no word on which Nintendo games will receive Denuvo protection. 

A Denuvo spokesperson later clarified that Nintendo itself is not in any way connected with the creation of their product. Rather, the product was due to the demand from current publishing partners.

Denuvo has been the object of controversy over the years for severely impacting game performance. Games such as Resident Evil Village were forced to create a patch to fix the issues caused by Denuvo, while Humankind developers dropped Denuvo from their game.

That said, Denuvo spokesperson mentioned that Denuvo Switch protection will be entirely offline: “We are aware that the Nintendo Switch is a mobile console and therefore has limited online capabilities, so we designed our solution to be fully offline, no online checks required.” Fingers crossed that owners of Denuvo-protected games will not experience performance issues.