After just over a week Yuzu Emulator creators have settled with Nintendo after the lawsuit accused them of “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale”.
Turns out they decided to give up without any legal fight and will have to pay up a big sum of 2.4 million $ to the gaming giant. Not only that, any traces of Yuzu Emulator on the internet, including websites, rights of usage, distribution of the emulator code, and more, will belong to Nintendo from now on.
According to Nintendo, Yuzu was why the company lost millions in sales of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom game. That’s because the game leaked a month before its official release and was downloaded over a million times before said release. At the same time, Yuzu’s Patreon site was booming and the emulator got plenty of donations, which led to believe that the two cases were connected.
The developer for Yuzu (Nintendo Switch) and Citra (Nintendo 3DS) emulators has stated that both projects got affected in the process and their support is discontinued.
Both, websites and Github resources for both emulators, have been taken down. Their website now displays a message from the developer explaining the situation.
According to creators the piracy was never their intention, but they realize that their actions led to illegal activity and intellectual property theft. That’s why they decided to settle the conflict immediately.
Here’s the whole statement from Bunnei, the developer 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.
Personally, I’ll say that emulating a console currently on the market was a bit sketchy and seemed to be taken look at sooner or later. Nintendo loves suing anyone messing with their property and many times I would not agree with their actions, but this time I can see their point of view.
The Big N is known for its lack of support for many old titles, so emulators are a great way of preserving a game for yourself (if, of course, you own said game) if you don’t want to break your cartridge or DVD due to wear and tear. In a case such as this using emulator is completely justified and I wish Nintendo wasn’t so harsh about it.
So the issue of preserving an old title can be a bit tricky. Emulation is one way to do it, but it would be great if Nintendo would give us more options than a pretty lacking Nintendo Switch Online to play our favorite retro games.
As for emulating a modern console with games wildly available. Yeah, I’m not surprised that Nintendo wanted to shut down Yuzu. I just don’t want future retro gamers to have the same issues with Switch titles as we now have with NES, Game Boy, etc. Let’s hope it won’t be a big problem.
