Popular Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu will shut down effective immediately. The news comes a week after Nintendo launched legal proceedings against creators Tropic Haze.
According to filings posted to social media by Game File’s Stephen Totilo, Tropic Haze agreed to settle with Nintendo to the tune of $US2.4 million. According to the filings, Tropic Haze chose to settle because the amount it would have had to pay to continue the case would have been about the same, and it was likely to have lost anyway.
Tropic Haze will now pull the emulator from its digital repositories, hand control of the primary Yuzu domain over to Nintendo, and shut down its Patreon and Discord.
Yuzu issued a statement via its social media channels:
We write today to inform you that yuzu and uzu’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.
The points outlined in Tropic Haze’s statement mirror Nintendo’s list of grievances as filed last week: the emulator was being used for piracy and the circumvention of the Switch’s internal security, people used it to play stolen ROMs of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom weeks ahead of launch, and used those ROMs to spoil the game for paying customers. Nintendo also successfully argued that because Tropic Haze sought monetary support through its Patreon, it was profiting from the piracy its software enabled.
And so, another legal stoush goes Nintendo’s way. There are, of course, plenty of arguments still to be made about the use of emulators in regard to games preservation. But Yuzu was emulating a console that is current and available on the market. That’s the kind of thinking some might describe as “A bold strategy, Cotton.” Others might call it a fast track to the Find Out end of the Fuck Around And Find Out equation. In matters like this, it is not generally wise to bet against Nintendo because the house always wins.
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