Did any games end up actually using emulator protection?

[sexually_inactive]

Last I remember hearing about Switch emulator protection, developers could purchase it from some Nintendo developer portal but I haven't heard of any cases of games using it. It just seems like some million dollar project that failed and got forgotten.

 

[masagrator]

Also not aware of such thing, it could be something local, but definitely not even one big worldwide release used it on Switch 1.

 

[mathew77]

@sexually_inactive
No, not a single game — for now.

 

[masagrator]

I think licensing price was higher than potential savings from using it, it's not like pirates from emu scene would buy game in most cases, they would just move to different game or pirate it on different platform.

 

[Space_Goddess_Samus_Aran]

there was this Denuvo shit for switch, but i didnt heard that it was used at all.

 

[Sono]

I think Hello Kitty Island Adventure might be a good candidate to look into.

I know that the PC version has Denuvo.
The game runs like absolute dogshit on Switch, with frequent freezes that last 1-2 seconds.

This is also the only Switch game I cannot emulate. While other games run "normally", this game fills up the RAM in the first few minutes, until the emulator crashes. Trying to load the game afterwards will fail due to the emulator failing to load pre-compiled code caches due to how big it is. Its generated cache MUCH bigger than any other game that has been played for hours, and due to how fast it fills up, how bad the game runs, and the desktop version also containing Denuvo, this reeks from the other side of the planet to be investigated, as its emulator-defeating aspects feel maliciously intentional.

 

[mathew77]

While other games run "normally", this game fills up the RAM in the first few minutes

But the game starts normally first time?

 

[masagrator]

Many other games did that with emulators and turned out that emulators had memory leaks related to specific way how games use memory allocation with which emulators couldn't keep up or were getting confused. I really doubt it's related to Denuvo, it's just wasn't fixed by anybody who maintains that emulator because they deemed that fixing support for that game is not worth wasted time.

I bet that if there would be any game with Denuvo, it would crash out when detecting that SaltyNX runs - getting unexpected values from kernel calls. SaltyNX can be detected very easy as long as you don't stick with just checking modules using official SDK calls as it won't pop up there. And currently with SaltyNX 1.5.1 there is not even one game as far as I'm aware being completely incompatible with SaltyNX - except for base version of Witcher 3 Complete Edition which really noone plays.

 

[Sono]

But the game starts normally first time?

The very first time I've opened the game, I was getting around 12FPS (normally I get ~56FPS even on the heaviest games, just barely reaching 60), and RAM usage was climbing steadily. But once I got out of the plane sequence, RAM usage skyrocketed so fast, that Process Explorer didn't even show how high it got before it crashed. From this point, even after clearing the cache, it crashes shortly after trying to load the savegame. Rarely I see a few frames of in-game before it crashes, and I have to clear the cache again.

Post automatically merged: Sep 14, 2025

Many other games did that with emulators and turned out that emulators had memory leaks related to specific way how games use memory allocation with which emulators couldn't keep up or were getting confused. I really doubt it's related to Denuvo, it's just wasn't fixed by anybody who maintains that emulator because they deemed that fixing support for that game is not worth wasted time.

You seem to be right.

Tried a different emulator (had to patch it to prevent a crash at boot time), and with JIT and HLE disabled, I get 15FPS on my iGPU with the CPU running at 1.6GHz (actually locks to 30FPS at 3.8GHz, lol). The game runs better on this crappy setup than on the real intended hardware

It still leaks memory, but it takes a really long time, as opposed to leaking almost double digit Gigabytes per second. Sure, I have to save often in case the inevitable happens, and it takes 967s (~16mins) to load back into game once it leaks too much, but still wildly better than what I had before

Although... maybe all of it is not the emulator's fault, and the game is just simply programmed like dogshit. This problem doesn't happen with literally any other game I try.