The first of the tools Denuvo is offering to Switch developers is Nintendo Switch Emulator Protection, a “revolutionary technology to protect games launching on Nintendo Switch from piracy”.
According to Denuvo, the new tech can be applied to Switch games to block the ability to play them on PC emulators.
“Even if a game is protected against piracy on its PC version, the version released on Nintendo Switch can be emulated from day one and played on PC, therefore bypassing the strong protections offered on the PC version,” the company says. “This can happen with any of the numerous games available on Nintendo Switch.
Emulators are generally written to play the games the best they can, not to be an exact replica of the original hardware. Getting stuff like timings and generally ignored side effects right can be quite a pain to write code against. I don’t think many emulators exist that will actively try to hide that they’re emulators, unless games try to detect specific emulators (after which the specific detection mechanism gets patched out).
That said, I think it should be possible to emulate a Switch close enough to real hardware that Denuvo’s product will just think it’s a real device, unless they can force you to update the game very often so they can mess around with their emulator detection.