Denuvo Launches Nintendo Switch Emulator Protection
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https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/mass-effect-legendary-e...
Note how getting rid of Denuvo also saved about one gigabyte (!!) of disk space.
Denuvo slowed some games down so much that playing online with a cracked version is considered cheating.
I am baffled they are still on the market. If I find out that a game comes with Denuvo DRM, I will not spend money on it. In times where GPU prices are daylight robbery and most people are paying with old hardware, I can't understand why game publishers would deliberately cripple performance of their games. Don't they talk to the developers to find out how much money it cost to optimize the last 10% fps out of the game in the first place?
This generation is completely dead to me, maybe next one.
The extreme anti gaming-community behaviour of the last three years by Nvidia have convinced me to wait more. Prices are still insane.
I prefer to wait, may be for another year, and see these companies suffer a bit, and lower prices more.
I also hope Intel gets their drivers up to spec and becomes a third worthy contender.
Summer is almost over anyway, and university is a month away. I can wait until next summer.
But that is the thing.. you have to be a conscious customer. You can't just say 'oh, i guess everyone is getting screwed; on average i am being screwed less; so i win..'.
The only appropriate response is, and I am not using profanity lightly:
'No. Because fuck you that is why.'
I accept I am a minority, but I also was raised in different era and have patience that comes with age.
Talk about irony. Ethics, piracy and all.
They got sued for that and eventually settled.
[1] http://rsdn.org/forum/shareware/6733058 (in Russian)
1) They sent me a bash script to run on my system (this was on macOS). The script basically went to the root of my hard drive and listed every single file on the system. I told them I could not send them the output because I had data from other companies in there that was under NDA. They were kind of shocked that I read the script and looked at the output.
2) They wanted me to use GPG to cryptographically sign something. When I pointed out that this was for commercial work and we hadn't paid the licensing for using it in a commercial product, they basically hemmed and hawed and said, "Oh that doesn't matter. There's nothing they can do about it."
So yeah, I don't really have a lot of respect for DRM companies, as they all seem to do the very things they're trying to stop others from doing.
The official word from the company is that the post is wrong and that DENUVO had the right and always will have the right to use their software: https://vmpsoft.com/20170606/vmprotect-and-denuvo-gmbh/
If we have learnt anything, its that Nintendo couldn't care less about customers experience and solely on their IP protection. So Denuvo will have a client for life now.
I don't even see Nintendo removing this protection in later updates after the big sales peak.
This is just an announcement that the DRM SDK exists for companies to add to their games, not that it would be included in any specific games, Nintendo 1st party or otherwise.
Given the long mean time it takes to crack Denuvo games currently. I'm not surprised, it keeps games out of the pirate market long enough that by the time it's cracked the game is old enough that it's probably already at a reduced price.
I think it was the Dying Light 2 devs who openly admitted this being a standard practice when the game launched.
I remember my first job out of college, I was asked to write code that caused our software to cheat at a certain industry benchmark. I was very junior, but still realized it was wrong. I finally worked up the courage to tell my boss that I had an ethical problem with doing this and wouldn't do it, and to my surprise, he said "Oh, that's fine! We treat software developers well here. I'll just give you a different bug ticket to work on!"
Jim, a few cubicles down from me had no problem writing the benchmark-cheating code. It's kind of futile.
It is worthwhile for us to read and reflect on the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.*
If you consider mechanical and chemical engineering there are also people who develop nerve gas agents (usually deployed against civilians), butterfly mines, cluster munitions and incendiary artillery rounds ready to burn your enemies cities to the ground.
Some anti cheating / piracy software that "arguably works" is pretty tame compared to that.
Otherwise, I would be subjected to shitty racers who would ruin every race in the first lap, and cheaters who compete on hacks instead of talent.
I am also sure there are equivalent bad apples in every single gaming platform.
But sure, we can pretend that cheaters don’t matter as long as it’s not blatantly obvious to all other players.
I’ve bought games because there were no cracks available, I don’t think I’ve ever bought a game after pirating it.
There’s no way I’m alone in this.
I own literally thousands of games on Steam, and thousands more outside of Steam. I also relentlessly pirated every game I wanted to play for decades. The way to "fix" piracy is by companies providing a superior user experience, not by beating their paying customers with sticks.
The lack of availability of a pirate version of a game increases sales. This has been observed for many very popular games. Not so much for small and unknown ones.
At the same time, I have paid for games when they became available in Steam, years after I have played them, so I disagree on that point.
> At the same time, I have paid for games when they became available in Steam, years after I have played them, so I disagree on that point.
Presumably for vastly less money than they were charging at launch?
I’ve seen this claim repeated often, but never with good evidence.
Plenty of others have pirated games and then paid for them. I often pirate games after paying for them. Piracy enables people to try games in genres they aren't willing to take a chance on at full price, it serves as a form of advertising giving people a chance to get into a game or franchise they might never have come across otherwise, and plenty of people (myself included) have refused to buy or play games until a crack is available.
I doubt a meaningful amount of people did this, but I’d love to see evidence to the contrary.
>and plenty of people (myself included) have refused to buy or play games until a crack is available.
Well, yeah, but it’s HN and we have all kinds of crazy people here who aren’t very representative of the overall market.
Multiple studies have shown that pirates are often the best customers. (see https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-spend-much-more-money-on-mu...)
It makes sense. If somebody is supper passionate about games, or music, or movies they might pirate to get early releases, alternate versions, and to try new things. Collectors may even want to keep their purchased media untouched/unopened or may just want easy access to their purchases.
I've pirated things I've purchased just because it was faster than ripping a CD myself or even going into the next room to take a DVD off the shelf and using the player.
But that’s a completely different claim, no?
Also, Torrentfreak is horrible quality agenda-pushing blogspam. I wouldn’t take their interpretation of a survey of unknown quality (which they didn’t even bother to link to) at face value.
And if we were to do that, perhaps the best explanation is that more technically oriented pirates were more likely to spend money on streaming services in 2016 than the average person. Perhaps piracy was just a proxy for tech savvy?
DRM today is largely used by bad publishers to prevent buyers from realizing how trash their games are before paying for them.
The only meaningful difference between Denuvo and floppy-DRM is that Denuvo employs a bit more sophisticated obfuscation scheme.
Funny, I don't remember any code wheel having kernel level access to my system... They also never caused performance issues https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/282924-denuvo-really-does...
How do you solve cheating problem though? When I sit down playing a multiplayer game I don't want to see anyone cheating, botting etc. It's not fun.
Yes it's a cat and mouse game between the cheat makers and the devs and anti cheat solutions are not perfect but without some anti cheat system most online games would be totally unplayable.
It works fine as far as I know.
Many of these solutions, both DRM and anti-cheat, work using the principle of checking if the user is using the original unmodified files, and checking if the user is not also modifying the memory of the running program with some tool.
Some people just like to cheat for the sake of it.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Lars argues that when people make the decision to buy or pirate something, they're spending four 'currencies' which each person values differently:
* Money-dollars
* Time-dollars
* Pain-in-the-butt-dollars
* Integrity-dollars
As a teenager, I had near-infinite time dollars, and very few money dollars. That reversed when I got a real job. Implementing Denuvo (or other DRM malware) increases a product's cost in Pain-in-the-butt dollars significantly because the pirated version without it is better.
I own a Switch, have purchased several games for it, and most of my playtime is on my PC in an emulator now. I can use a better controller, run games at higher framerates and resolution, and use mods. The Switch is still nice on the go, but anything beyond casual games using an anti-emulation solution become less appealing to me.
"cybercrime" is such a tell word for press release BS.
What's interesting here is that there's clearly enough pressure from emulation of a system that's still the most current in its category that this product exists. There are clearly some downsides to the savings of pulling ARM architecture off-the-shelf.
To be fair, its competitors are basically x86-64 boxes…
If you're "pirating" a game, I imagine (because this is why I pirated games in the pre-Steam days) it's because you can't afford to buy it or you refuse to give the publisher/developer your money on principle. Either way, you're not a potential customer. So sure, this may result in less emulation but not necessarily higher sales.
I have yet to see compelling numbers that show these systems do much of anything.
The markets most heavily served by piracy are either
1. Those completely neglected by normal distribution channels (poor countries)
2. Those who are extremely budget conscious (poor people in any country)
But it's a good sales pitch to execs to show piracy numbers and claim "Think of all the lost revenue!!!!" - when the blunt reality is that most who pirated simply don't have the means to pay for it in the first place.
The right short term answer is to heavily discount digital products for those markets (see: Steam sales) and bring the price back in line with the budget available.
The long term answer is political, and will require restructuring how digital products are made and licensed (it's time to ditch the per-copy-sold costs - they aren't the right answer for goods that have ZERO marginal cost per copy produced).
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/11/faulty-drm-breaks-doz...
So this anti-consumer garbage is likely calculated, by the publisher, to be worth paying for Denuvo even if it eventually gets cracked.
So you would let cheaters win? What a weird take. Small amount of people wants to ruin game for everyone > the solution shouldn't be abandoning online games
I don't cheat in most games, but there are a lot of games that are pretty grindy in genres I otherwise enjoy for the story, and I want to just get through it because I have a job, family, kids, and other hobbies and friends to keep up with, but I still enjoy gaming. I no longer have the ability or time to spend 200+ hours to get all aspects of a game story completed. Meanwhile, there are other games I could cheat in I would never do, because the difficulty of them is the point (Dark Souls).
Cheating in online games, especially competitive online games, is a real problem. But another piece of the problem is that this genre is dominated by "free" games which have cash shops, microtransactions, and extremely aggressive anti-cheat software, all of which are anti-user.
It may turn out that cracking is the path of least resistance, but making emulation more accurate is less of a legal issue - I for one would feel comfortable working on it "in the open" (which I may well do, depending on how much I care about the first Denuvo'd switch games to come out).
With modern hardware, I don't think perfectly accurate emulation will ever be possible. We don't have that for the PS2 and XBox, maybe on the original PlayStation, but I am not even sure. Emulators for modern systems are all high level, emulating API calls instead of the hardware.
Modern hardware is easier to emulate "accurately", simply because the real hardware does not behave as consistently as, say, a 6502 core. DRAM and cache latency are variable, and the core/bus frequencies are scaling up and down all the time. Furthermore, the coupling between the CPU and GPU is more asynchronous than it used to be.
Your emulator doesn't have to hit any specific timings, becaure there aren't any - it just has to be within some range of plausibility.
I wouldn't be surprised if denuvo does make use of timing to some extent, but it won't need cycle-accurate emulation to defeat, just fudging the numbers to get close enough.
That's pretty much all we can do. Of course neutralizing Denuvo (i.e. cracking it to demonstrate that it's not meaningfully preventing piracy) would also help.
No they haven't. They stopped paying for Denuvo after a time, given they have to pay on a monthly basis, because the number of sales they make goes down over time and Denuvo has done it's job.
So hacked Switch consoles will continue to be able to play these games perfectly well, emulators will find a method around it (see: Ape Escape PS1 DRM patches), and only legitimate Switch consoles will suffer as whatever amount of unpack-execute-dbgbreak-call-repack cycles are done to "protect" the game code.
Realistically Nintendo can do whatever they want, they could take a dump in times square and people would flock to it. They've been selling broken controllers for 6 years.
* Big connectivity issues for a long while after launch(I couldn't play on my couch with the switch in front of my TV)
* Aforementioned drift
* Sticky buttons on Pro controllers, those still happen
* None of the Nintendo controllers correctly advertise polling rate for BT HID, so they're impossible to use on most phones
All of that at more than premium prices, even in refreshed/newly produced units.
Did they somehow fix that? I basically gave up on my Switch for that reason. Having to lean forward on the couch to get the controller to reliably work was a dealbreaker.
That said, as far as first-party products go, the Sony Playstation controllers have been consistently the highest quality products across generations as far as controllers go, but from a feel perspective I prefer the Xbox controllers.
Meanwhile, Nintendo has been smarter on Switch, shipping first-party emulators for NES and SNES (but without the games people actually want in the catalog), and has convinced Square to re-release Seiken Densetsu 3 with an official English translation on the Switch w/ the full Mana Trilogy, which I bought and paid for, even though I could emulate all three games because they had improved graphics and an official translation.
I think the concern you have here is wildly overblown, and for the most part there are a tiny tiny tiny amount of people who are pirating Switch games by running them in emulators. Most Switch piracy is happening /on the Switch/ by people running games off the SD Card instead of buying carts/downloading officially, using patched OS / loaders. Nintendo basically killed this for Switches made after the first run in the first generation, and it's even a non-issue.
And you seriously can't see the problem? The Steam Deck is direct competitor to the Switch, that also just happens to be the best Nintendo console ever made. Valve profits from it, but can deny any wrong doing. I think you just don't want to admit that intellectual property is a thing - something we hold in high regard in western economies.
> intellectual property is a thing - something we hold in high regard in western economies
Citation needed. Both me and lots of us here on HN certainly don't hold intellectual property in high regard, because as framework it's done a lot to damage progress.
Intellectual Property law in the US is a complete mess and any rational analysis would acknowledge that.
That said, I don't play Switch games on my Steam Deck, I don't even have any Switch roms. I own a Switch, why would I play those games on a Steam Deck when I can just play them on the Switch?
Yes, the Steam Deck is the best Nintendo console ever made, for emulating Chrono Trigger (my favorite game, and arguably the greatest RPG of all time, released in 1995 for the SNES), that for some reason Nintendo has never re-released on the Switch or provided in their first-party emulators on Switch, despite it being the most requested game for the platform.
So... I reiterate my original statements. You are blowing up a non-issue out of proportion.
That said, Chrono Trigger originally released in 1995, when Nintendo entered into pretty serious agreements with publishers. No, they cannot unilaterally republish it, but they have significant power here and have worked with Square on re-releasing other games. Chrono Trigger is one that they've never republished (possibly due to agreements with Sony since it was republished on PSX).
It's not the primary purpose of the device. I've yet to even bother loading up an emulator and have just been playing PC games.
It's basically as ludicrous as suggesting Microsoft is also supporting Switch piracy because Yuzu also runs on Windows.
What is Valve getting away with / what would Nintendo sue for? Valve is just selling a general-purpose computer that is intended for - and I suspect (but don't have numbers) mostly used for - running games from Steam. That it's a general-purpose computer and thus ends up running some emulators doesn't make it illegal any more than, say, a Macbook, which can run emulators just as well. Valve would have to somehow be going out of their way to intentionally push/support running Switch games on the Steamdeck for Nintendo to have any standing to go after them.