Nintendo Claims Yuzu Scalp in $2.4 Million Settlement
Originally brought to our attention by Game File’s Stephen Totilo, Nintendo have filed a lawsuit against 3DS and Switch emulator Developers “Yuzu.” While many thought that nothing would come of it, the matter has been settled in a court in Rhode Island as this morning news broke of Nintendo Switch Emulator Yuzu settling with Nintendo for $2.4 million in damages, while simultaneously pulling its emulator and source code offline. Yuzu release the full statement below:
“Hello yuz-ers and Citra fans:
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 faith, 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.”
I feel like this is a court-ordered or lawyer-recommended statement because it would be incredibly naive as an emulator developer to think that software like this wouldn’t be used for piracy purposes, especially when they explicitly instruct you on how to do so. Which appears to be a part of Yuzu’s downfall:
Trawling through the initial 45-page document you can READ HERE, shows some interesting insight into how much impact the emulator had on Nintendos IP, with over 1 million copies of Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom downloaded before the games actual release, effectively torpedoing the argument that the emulator was used for backing up an individuals collection. Furthermore, the vast majority of these piracy listings listed Yuzu as the emulator of choice to play this game. They state that: “Notably, between May 1 and May 12, membership on the Yuzu Patreon, which provides paid members more updated “early access” builds of Yuzu,16 doubled . On information and belief, thousands of additional paid members of Yuzu’s Patreon signed up so that they could download the early access build and play unlawful copies of Zelda: TotK . On information and belief, Defendant and its agents were fully aware that the reason membership of the Patreon exploded was that Yuzu was being used for unlawful play of pirated copies of Zelda: TotK .”
Another main pain point brought to light by these documents is that content on the Yuzu website seemingly points to how people can obtain prod keys in order to play pirated software, and the emulators themselves circumnavigate the encryption protections put in place by Nintendo and Developers with a quick start guide informing users they need a “Hackable Nintendo Switch system” which Nintendo Lawyers state “Yuzu developers brazenly acknowledge that using Yuzu necessitates hacking or breaking into a Nintendo Switch.”
And the final nail in the coffin would be the profits made from the Emulator, which while it is free to download, the Court documents allege that the Patreon page generates roughly $30,000 USD per month, and Google Play premium versions at $50,000 USD, as well as donations which cannot be estimated.
Nintendo has a litigious reputation for going after piracy but the general consensus is that people on Social Media are unhappy with these recent developments, stating that this is a major blow to game preservation, but with the games industry in its current damaged state I tend to think that less piracy is a good thing isn’t it? For those who claim the backup and archival purposes of emulation, I would really be keen to know how many people legitimately use it for preservation compared to the overwhelming majority who would use it to play pirated games.
I would really like to hear your thoughts on the matter and hope there can be a positive and respectful discussion on what you think about this whole situation