One of the industry’s biggest legal battles has just taken place, as the developers of Yuzuone of the most popular Nintendo Switch emulators, were sued by Nintendo because the program could break the console’s encryption barriers to allow its titles to be played on devices such as the Steam Deck. As a result, Yuzu’s team will have to pay 2.4 million dollars in damage and close the emulator forever. And the internet is not taking this news well.
Yuzu and Citra fans are already starting to copy emulator files to DVD
It should be noted that this team had also developed the emulator Nintendo 3DS known as Citra. So, when users tried to access the official sitesthey found this message: “Today we are writing to inform you that Yuzu and its Citra support will be discontinued effective immediately”, 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 close both emulators, but they will also disable their Discordhis Patreon and their sites, basically wiping their entire brand off the internet.
The followers of this emulator reacted negatively to this news, since Yuzu and Citra were of vital importance, not only for running Switch and Nintendo 3DS games on PC or on Steam Deck, but many also consider this type of programs as essential for the preservation of video games. There is a bit of reason in the latter, since Nintendo just closed the eShop of the Nintendo 3DS last year and they don’t even make any more units of the old portable. That is why we can find publications like that of @ninjadynamicsin which we can see it downloading all the files from both emulators on blank DVDs, so we can save them forever.
On the other hand, many believe that the biggest mistake of the Yuzu developers was their handling of the ROM distribution. 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 their followers money through Patreon, so that they can access the rom, its updates and more content. It seems that they were able to win about $30,000 with this practice, which seriously bothered Nintendo.
Of course, at the end of the day, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom sold millions of units anyway, and the piracy that Yuzu’s team facilitated is unlikely to have affected their profits. But charging for access to the rom through 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 publishing both emulators everywhere, and then making backups on blank DVDs or external memories.
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