Nintendo strikes again.
The team behind the Switch emulator Yuzu has settled with Nintendo and agreed to pay $2.4 million USD (roughly $3.2 million CAD) in damages and will shut down active development.
Nintendo sued Tropic Haze, Yuzu’s creators, in U.S. Federal Court, claiming that the emulator is primarily designed to circumvent its encryption. The Japanese gaming giant says that the Switch emulator allowed roughly one million people to play The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom weeks ahead of its release.
Yuzu’s Patreon earned $30,000 a month, though it has since been pulled from the crowd-sourced platform.
[yuzu]
yuzu, in its current form, will cease to exist.
Their settlement with Nintendo prohibits any distribution of yuzu in built and source code form. Development must also stop.
The yuzu website and related services will also be shut down.https://t.co/INBkXCf38d pic.twitter.com/rMeKeRCeFv
— OatmealDome (@OatmealDome) March 4, 2024
[Citra]
Citra is now shutting down.
The GitHub repository, along with all downloads, have been removed. https://t.co/brQOjpLi8h pic.twitter.com/8SKeXWcDr9
— OatmealDome (@OatmealDome) March 4, 2024
The settlement terms forbids the distribution of Yuzu, along with its website and other services. Citra, a popular 3DS emulator made by Tropic Haze, will also be discontinued.
In a statement to users available on its website, Tropic Haze said the following about the end of Yuzu:
“Hello yuz-ers and Citra fans: We write today to inform you that yuzu and yuzu’s support of Citra are being discontinued, effective immediately.
yuzu and its team have always been against piracy. We started the projects in good faith, out of passion for Nintendo and its consoles and games, and were not intending to cause harm. But we see now that because our projects can circumvent Nintendo’s technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy. In particular, we have been deeply disappointed when users have used our software to leak game content prior to its release and ruin the experience for legitimate purchasers and fans.
We have come to the decision that we cannot continue to allow this to occur. Piracy was never our intention, and we believe that piracy of video games and on video game consoles should end. Effective today, we will be pulling our code repositories offline, discontinuing our Patreon accounts and Discord servers, and, soon, shutting down our websites. We hope our actions will be a small step toward ending piracy of all creators’ works.
Thank you for your years of support and for understanding our decision.”
Yuzu first launched back in 2018. While it’s an impressive emulator, game compatibility remains spotty at best. It’s also worth noting that, like all things on the internet, you can’t really kill off an emulator entirely. A group of Yuzu users will likely continue to work on the emulator in some capacity.
The world of emulation and ROMs, which is undeniably very important to game preservation, has always operated in a legally and morally gray area, and as you can see from the note above, Yuzu’s team claims “piracy was never” its intention with the project, despite how things turned out (though I’m not sure I really believe them).
Right now, it’s unclear what this precedent-setting case means for Nintendo console/handheld emulation, but the future doesn’t look good for other Switch emulators like Ryujinx.
Source: U.S. Federal Court, @OatmealDome, Yuzu Via: IGN
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