Nintendo sue and shut down Yuzu Switch Emulator, devs to pay $2.4 million in settlement

Switch emulation won't fully go away, this is like a game of wack-a-mole for Nintendo, but it is going to scare a lot of devs working on Nintendo emulators. PATREON: www.patreon.com/yongyea TWITTER: www.twitter.com/yongyea INSTAGRAM: www.instagram.com/yong_yea TIKTOK: www.tiktok.com/@yongyea TOP PATRONS [BIG BOSS] - Devon B - gergely oggolder - Jonathan Ball [BOSS] - Charlie Galvin - Gerardo Andrade - Marketing aag - Michael Redmond [LEGENDARY] - azalea - dirt

Both Yuzu and Citra are open source. This doesn't change anything, there will be forks under new names.

I did not know about the patreon access. That is what got them in trouble. Not very smart.

The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates. Gabe Newell

They flew too close to the sun.

It is my understanding that the main legal stucking point was not the Patreon, but rather that they had clear instructions how to circumvent Nintendos copyright protections. Having a patreon and running an emulator is not illegal, but instructions on how to violate copyright protections are. I've also heard rumors that the team itself were implicated in the early leaks, which would have been found out had discovery gone ahead, landing members of the team in Bowser-levels of trouble. They settled to save themselves, as Nintento basically found them in the act of performing the crime, and it was only going to get worse from here.

Emulation is 100% necessary and vital for preservation, but this time around Yuzu had it coming for being too cheeky. The Switch still is a console being sold, unlike the N64, GameCube, Wii... and they really screwed up with the whole TOTK fiasco, all of that while also pay-walling your way into getting TOTK running on the latest build days before the game was even officially released. Instead of focusing on Nintendo, people should really push back against bad actors like Yuzu that taint the reputation of the emulation scene.

Yuzu had this one coming tbh, they tried to monetize parts of their service

The issue with Yuzu was monetizing their emulator, yes it was through Patreon, but they placed features behind that paywall, they didn`t do anything to protect themselves, including making a website with detailed explanation on how to do things.

Yong forgot to mention the part that Yuzu was actually collecting player metrics and other data. As part of the settlement, the Yuzu team had to hand over the collected player data. Yuzu sold out their users.

yuzu Early acess did not allow games to be played earlier than release. it was simply a newer build of yuzu.

Nintendo has money to sue yet doesn't have money to make their games better?

God, imagine if nintendie offered a better service then emulators? wouldn't that be freaking crazy?

Almost as if Nintendo is no fan of having people sticking their fingers in their honey jar. Who would have guessed. It's simple, don't promote and monetize your emulator of a CURRENT system around piracy and you won't get F'd.

Thank you for covering this!!!

I can definitely see the justifications for shutting down yuzu (neither Nintendo nor Yuzu is innocent) But Citra? Talk about guilt by association. Good thing the code is open source

the biggest issue was Yuzu used fixes for TOTTK before the game was out and put the fixes behind patreon.

Emulating old games Nintendo doesn't make accessible on new systems or simply makes no money from anymore is one thing, it has no effect on the company. However, to emulate their current console which they are still actively making money from is just straight up dumb and this was always going to be the end result.

realistically speaking, yuzu devs did have it coming when it comes to them monetizing on the service with patreon and the like, but while I'm not under the illusion people just like free shit and that mostly why the pirate, I also know that game companies as a whole defininently hasn't been consistent with quality with the shit they been spewing out these days, while their is some outliers like TOTK and Eldin Ring, the vast majority of companies as a whole mostly want us to pay for half finished, or broken games that aren't really worth the price of 60$ or even 70$ so I can see why most people nowadays have the tendency to pirate these games instead of buying them, and definently with older games and backwards compatibility cause they are really not giving good reasonable services where I can play these games without paying and arm and a leg for a game that literally came out decades ago. Once again, I feel like theirs definently things that can be done on the companies ends when it comes to their playerbase, because while I'm aware that pirating will probably never go away, I can see that gaming companies can definently find better solutions to make it so that players dont feel inclined to pirate because of the rising issues as of late. Idk just my thoughts, yall can have your opinions just personally think that nintendo or really any other big time company hasn't really given me any good reason as to why I should spend my money on them as a whole

Emulation is very important for game preservation, but I feel like for a long time that’s how it was used; if we’re emulating games on launch day, it’d be a miracle not to get sniped by a Nintendo lawsuit before picking up a controller