Months after shutting down the popular Switch emulator Yuzu over copyright infringement and piracy concerns, Nintendo initiated a mass takedown of related backups and apparent clones on the Microsoft-owned platform GitHub. Over 8,000 repositories were removed as the Zelda publisher seemingly tried to stomp out forks of the emulator before they sprouted up elsewhere.
“Because the reported network that contained the allegedly infringing content was larger than one hundred (100) repositories, and the submitter alleged that all or most of the forks were infringing to the same extent as the parent repository, GitHub processed the takedown notice against the entire network of 8,535 repositories, inclusive of the parent repository,” reads a notice posted on GitHub about the takedown request (via GamesRadar).
The URL names for some of the removed files reference mirrors of various versions of Yuzu as well as Pineapple, another Switch emulator based on the Yuzu code. “The reported repositories offer and provide access to the yuzu emulator or code based on the yuzu emulator,” a representative for Nintendo wrote in the takedown request. “The yuzu emulator is primarily designed to play Nintendo Switch games. Specifically, yuzu illegally circumvents Nintendo’s technological protection measures and runs illegal copies of Nintendo Switch games.”
Nintendo reached a court-approved legal settlement in March with Yuzu’s creators that would require them to cease work on the emulator, hand over all materials related to it, and pay a $US2.4 million penalty in an apparent warning to any other groups who might try to emulator Nintendo’s consoles in the future. Discord also took down servers hosting the Yuzu homebrew community offline.
The Switch manufacturer ramped up its war on Yuzu in the wake of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s pre-release leak last year. Nintendo claimed that over 1 million players pirated the game during this period, using Yuzu to emulate the illicit copies and play them on PC. The hit 2023 game has currently sold over 20 million copies.
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