Irdeto’s cancerous tumor in the gaming industry continues to spread, and now the technology is available for the Nintendo Switch (poor handheld, how much will everything chug on it because of it…?).
Nintendo Switch Emulation Protection was unveiled a year ago. Still, two days later, we learned that the Japanese company had no involvement in the project, so we were right to think there wouldn’t be much interest in Irdeto’s product. However, here’s the official announcement from Irdeto that it is officially licensed middleware, so it is available on Nintendo’s Developers Portal (NDP). The company is beating its chest that they are the first security company to use NDP “with their revolutionary technology to fight piracy,” we say: what about game preservation…?
“As gamers, we know first-hand how piracy negatively affects the gaming industry. We’re thrilled to be part of the Nintendo Developers Portal to provide the latest technologies to help fight this issue for Nintendo Switch players and developers. We witness an increasing need to protect against emulation on PC from game launch; our solution is a must-have for publishers to monetize the games fairly on this platform and not impact PC game sales,” Irdeto CEO Doug Lowther wrote in the statement. We wonder how many times he laughed while writing that. Oh, and might we add that Baldur’s Gate III doesn’t have DRM? It’s on GOG and has sold over five million copies. What are we talking about?
Irdeto is also looking to stomp on game modding, too. With or without Denuvo, Unreal Engine Protection can be used to protect UE games by developers who may consider themselves gods. It prevents data mining, eliminates cheaters and stops decryption of files containing game data so that the protected game cannot be modified. Since Denuvo Anti-Tamper itself is already lowering performance (just because someone hasn’t had this experience doesn’t mean everyone else is so lucky; the older the machine, the more performance degradation is involved), the Unreal Engine “protection” will probably also degrade the experience, even though we’ve seen many UE4 games run lousily…
Irdeto has even introduced a solution called Integrity Verification, which allows developers to verify the integrity of their game code to turn off static and dynamic modification so that code modification at game startup and during gameplay will not work (so you can’t cheat with the Cheat Engine, for example). Hopefully, everyone will laugh at these solutions, except for the money-hungry, greedy game publishers who could do with a repeat of 1983.
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