That didn’t take long – nearly a week later Nintendo has settled their lawsuit against the creators of Yuzu, a popular Nintendo Switch emulator.
The new settlement (via court documents) of the lawsuit will see Tropic Haze, the company behind Yuzu, paying out $2.4 million to Nintendo and ceasing all distribution, promotion, and development of the emulator.
What’s more, the company will hand over control of their website, yuzu-emu.org, to Nintendo. With the emulator effectively being shut down, the team’s $30,000/month Patreon will likely be shut down too.
The proposed settlement will call out Yuzu as being “primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing technological measures”, therefore violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The lawsuit was filed in the district of Rhode Island, alleging the Yuzu emulation software illegally circumvents their software encryption, and facilitates piracy. As with any proposed settlement it still requires a judge’s approval.
It still remains unclear why Nintendo hasn’t acted on the folks behind the Yuzu emulator until now, as the emulator was available for a number of years, months after the Switch console itself launched.
Nintendo previously filed copyright claims against another Switch emulator, Skyline, which ultimately got it cancelled. It’s possible Yuzu is being targeted due to it emulating current-generation technology, alongside requiring the circumventing of each game’s encryption.
Previous arguments for the lawsuit noted that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was downloaded over 1 million times before its official launch, and that Yuzu’s Patreon (which they use for support to develop the emulator) doubled during that time.
Nintendo has been known to aggressively protect their intellectual property and/or copyright. A notorious case with an alleged Switch hacker named Gary Bowser ended with the person imprisoned (though released now) and fined millions of dollars, which he’s still paying out.
[UPDATE] The folks behind Yuzu posted a statement after the settlement became public:
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.
This is Niche Gamer Tech. In this column, we regularly cover tech and things related to the tech industry.
