This morning I read the article about Denuvo on Switch. What do fellow pirates think of this? Could it pave the way for that crap on other consoles as well? Is it time to become a datahearer? (⌐■_■)
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.
I think theres another group that can but they only crack fifa
MKDEV retired.
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”
but can’t emulation emulate the denuvo?
Denuvo phones home constantly. Unless denuvo is removed from the game, the game won’t be playable unless it was legitimately purchased and can be verified on denuvo’s servers.
Furthermore denuvo encrypts the game files and the denuvo files and scrambles them all together, like mixing two jars of sand from different beaches, but the denuvo sand pieces know where everything is, so the game and copy protections still work.
So it’s hard to remove.
Best explanation ive ever read. thanks
I wonder if an emulator that breaks DRM could be considered illegal. I would imagine that emu teams would tread carefully around this sort of thing to avoid litigation.
Their goal is to prevent emulation. I don’t know how effective it would be at stopping on-console piracy.
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.
They can’t see that info on a spoof console
Just run the stolen games on a hacked switch and there’s nothing they can do about it
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.
On the bright side it will eventually make emulators more accurate
Note that 100% accuracy on emulators is not always a goal. Super accurate emulators might take more computation/emulation and run slower.
I’m curious, how so?
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It was really interesting, thank you!
Emulators typically cut a lot of corners to make emulation faster rather than make it more accurate. A truly accurate emulator would be impossible for the software to differentiate from the actual hardware.
but it gonna run slow as shit
its just another layer of security that will be broken
