Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Detecting that the game runs on an emulator should be rather trivial I imagine.

In theory, it's also rather trivial to remove these checks from the game binaries (if you have the knowledge, but enough people have).

What Denuvo does is it not only implements these checks very effectively, but it also modifies/obfuscates/encrypts the game binary/code in a lot of ways. I honestly don't know a lot about how it works, but this deep integration makes it very hard to remove.

There are two ways you'd circumvent Denuvo DRM. Either by emulating all checks and whatever Denuvo wants in order to verify the game copy is "legit", or to completely remove Denuvo from the game binary. Both have proven to be very hard and a lot of work. There are likely only very few people out there with the expertise to do it, and of these people, most of them probably work for Denuvo (most people understandably prefer getting money for what they are doing as opposed to street cred), and most others don't bother.

There's one known cracker who calls herself "EMPRESS", but even she doesn't crack nowhere near all Denuvo games, as it's simply too time consuming.

Some people assume that the Switch version of Denuvo will be less powerful, but I honestly doubt it's that much less effective. I don't think Denuvo would announce Switch availability if they'd think it wouldn't be effective, they have a lot of high-paying customers to lose (or not to gain).

It's always a battle between DRM companies and the cracking scene, but with Denuvo it has been a steep uphill battle so far.

Personally, I think that the Denuvo protection on Switch games would probably be a simpler system than the full-fat PC DRM. It would probably be too intense for the Switch's meagre processing power, and customers are definitely going to be annoyed when their game takes a minute or two to load up.

Could it pave the way for that crap on other consoles as well?

At this moment, the only current-gen console to be jailbroken is the Nintendo Switch. There's no need for external DRM on the PS5 and Xbox because publishers can trust that users will only be able to play legit copies of games. Switch games, on the other hand, don't have that guarantee, because dumping games on a jailbroken switch is very easy to do. Hence why Irdeto is planning to offer DRM for the Switch only.

Interestingly, this isn't the first time that third-party DRM was used on a Nintendo console. Some DS and Wii games were protected by an anti-piracy system called MetaFortress, which aimed to protect against flashcarts and pirated copies. Here's a video from the Dolphin emulator team about its use in the all-time classic, "The Smurfs: Dance Party"

On the bright side it will eventually make emulators more accurate

this will fuck overclocked switch consoles, i can imagine a check that verifies Mhz top speed and if is overclocked could be a hacker console or an emulator.

its just another layer of security that will be broken

Yeah, it sucks but then what can we do to prevent it... absolutely nothing. We have only one person willing to crack denuvo for a select few games and who knows when she might quit. Video game piracy has been in a tricky spot for sometime now.