Nintendo lawyers shuts down Yuzu and Citra emulators in $2.4 million lawsuit

metro.co.uk wrote:

Nintendo lawyers win again (Picture: Capcom)

Fan developer Tropic Haze has admitted its emulators enabled ‘extensive piracy’ as it caves in immediately to Nintendo’s demands to shut down.

People joke about Nintendo lawyers being unstoppable ninjas, but they’ve certainly earned their pay this week, regardless of where you stand on the issue of emulation.

Less than a week ago Nintendo accused creator Tropic Haze, who make the popular Switch emulator Yuzu, of facilitating piracy and leading to 1 million downloads of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, a week and a half before it was released.

Tropic Haze acknowledge that Yuzu breaks the Switch’s software encryption but has always insisted that it does not condone piracy. That hasn’t saved them though and they’ve immediately caved in to Nintendo’s demands to shut down Yuzu and 3DS emulator Citra.

The payout of $2.4 million is not very much, not given how much Tropic Haze was earning through Patreon and not compared to the infamous Gary Bowser – who still owes Nintendo $14 million for selling hacking devices.

Nintendo wasn’t really interested in the money though, but in shutting Yuzu down and giving a clear message to other emulator developers – as if it hadn’t been made clear before what Nintendo thinks of the concept.

The only surprise is why it took them so long to act against Yuzu, given it’s been around for years. Enabling early access to Tears Of The Kingdom is likely to have been the catalyst though, not least because of how it would have allowed for spoilers to spread as well.

It’s unclear what ramifications this might have for the wider emulation scene as Tropic Haze gave in so quickly, according to the official filing, Nintendo didn’t need to establish any legal precedent, but it’s certainly not good news.

It should also be a warning to those intending to make fan games or mods based on Nintendo titles, which always get shut down in the end and really aren’t worth starting.

As part of the agreement, Tropic Haze’s developers have to agree not to form a new group or work on emulation software again, so Yuzu and Citra really are dead.

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Although you can imagine they feel differently in private, the final message on Tropic Haze’s Discord is extremely contrite and once again insists that it was not their intention to encourage piracy.

‘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 authorised 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.’

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