Denuvo DRM is heading to Nintendo Switch games

While Denuvo was once very effective at stopping PC games piracy, the DRM has also faced plenty of controversy for being overly heavy and harming performance. Soon, Denuvo will be used on consoles too, with Irdeto making its DRM available to Nintendo Switch developers. 

The Nintendo Switch has been a very successful console, but emulators and Switch security bypasses have also allowed for a pretty big piracy community. Irdeto, the company behind Denuvo, is now going to be selling Nintendo Switch Emulator Protection to developers releasing Switch games.

The new form of protection should stop games from being playable on emulators, at least on day-one. For now, protecting against emulation seems to be the main focus, so we're unsure how this will impact those with a ‘hacked' Switch that run pirated games and homebrew directly on the console.

Nintendo is already pretty bad at supporting game preservation efforts, so this seems like the sort of technology the company would support without thinking about those titles being accessible decades from now. However, if we've learned anything over the years, it is that pirates always find a way. Denuvo went uncracked for a very long time on PC, but eventually, people caught up.

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KitGuru Says: It'll be interesting to see which publisher opts to use this first for a Switch release. Perhaps one of this year's big holiday Switch titles will end up utilising this. 

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