One of the biggest legal battles in the industry has just taken place, as the developers of Yuzu, one of the most popular Nintendo Switch emulators, were sued by Nintendo because the program could break the console’s encryption barriers to allow them to play their titles on devices such as the Steam Deck. As a result, the Yuzu team must pay $2.4 million in damages and shut down the emulator for good. And the internet is not taking this news well.
Nintendo Switch emulators, Yuzu and Citra, are already starting to copy emulator files to DVDs
It should be noted that this team had also developed the Nintendo 3DS emulator known as Citra. So, when users tried to access the official sites, they were met with this message: “Today we are writing to inform you that Yuzu and its Citra support will be discontinued with immediate effect”, followed by a paragraph in which they explain the situation with Nintendo and that, despite everything, they were always against piracy. Not only will they shut down both emulators, but they will also deactivate their Discord, Patreon and their sites, basically erasing their entire brand from the internet.
Fans of the emulator reacted negatively to this news, as Yuzu and Citra were vitally important, not only for running Switch and Nintendo 3DS games on PC or Steam Deck, but many also consider these types of programs to be essential for video game preservation. There is a bit of reason in the latter, due to the fact that Nintendo just closed the Nintendo 3DS eShop last year and they don’t even make units of the old handheld anymore. That’s why we can find posts like the one by @ninjadynamics, where we can see him downloading all the files of both emulators on blank DVDs, so he can keep them forever.
On the other hand, many believe that the biggest mistake of Yuzu’s developers was their handling of the rom distribution of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the newest installment in the legendary franchise. Nintendo claims that the game had been pirated more than 1 million times before it was officially released. The problem is that it seems that the team behind the emulator was charging its fans money through Patreon, so that they could access the rom, its updates and more content. It seems that they were able to make around $30,000 from this practice, which seriously pissed Nintendo off.
Of course, at the end of the day, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom sold millions of units anyway and it’s unlikely that the piracy facilitated by Yuzu’s team affected their profits. But having charged for access to the rom via Patreon before the release date was a huge mistake in the eyes of the law, possibly leading to the final verdict against them. However, everyone knows that deleting a file from the internet is literally possible, so we are not surprised that there are already people posting both emulators everywhere, and then making backups on blank DVDs or external memory sticks.
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