![Nintendo On Piracy Warpath, Sues Makers Of Popular Yuzu Emulator [Update: Nintendo Wins]](https://www.kotaku.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Untitled-design23.jpg?quality=75&w=640&h=360&crop=1)
Update 5/3/24 7:39 AM: Tropic Haze has agreed to settle with Nintendo. The group will pull its Yuzu emulator from digital repositories and will pay Nintendo $US2.4 million. Control of the primary Yuzu domain, yuzu-emu.org, has also been handed over to Nintendo.
Yuzu issued a statement via its social media channels:
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 fatih, 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.
Original piece continues below.
Nintendo is suing Tropic Haze, the creators of Yuzu, a popular Switch emulator.
The thrust of Nintendo’s suit is that Yuzu circumvents Nintendo’s internal software encryption, aiding and abetting the piracy of Switch games. The filings, reported by Stephen Totilo at Game File, show Nintendo has accused Tropic Haze of “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale”.
Nintendo points to the leaking and online proliferation of a ROM for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom a week and a half prior to its launch. It also alleges that the Tears of the Kingdom ROM was downloaded illegally over a million times ahead of its launch date, and that many of the sites that hosted the ROM recommended Yuzu as their emulator of choice. Nintendo goes on to state that monetary support for the Yuzu Patreon doubled during this period. It’s this last point that Nintendo will use to argue that Tropic Haze benefited monetarily from the piracy of Tears of the Kingdom.
Nintendo also points the finger at Tropic Haze for spoiling Tears of the Kingdom. I’m no lawyer, but I don’t believe spoilers are considered a prosecutable offence (much as the internet may wish they were).
Emulators like Yuzu have been in Nintendo’s legal crosshairs more and more in recent years. Because of the Switch’s proximity to older, well-understood hardware, it has been a ready target for software pirates. Some of the biggest Nintendo titles of the last few years have found their way online well ahead of release, as retail copies are dumped into illegal ROMs and uploaded. To date, there hasn’t been much Nintendo can do to curtail this. One wonders how it plans to address this problem with a potential Switch 2.
You can read the full Nintendo v Yuzu court filings here, and a digest of Totilo’s excellent reporting here.
Leave a Reply