Switch Emulator Yuzu to shut down and pay Nintendo $2.4 million
Yuzu is dead – The emulator team will pay Nintendo $2.4 million and wipe their emulator from existence
Nintendo’s legal battle against the Yuzu Switch emulator has ended, less than a week after news of the litigation came to light. Tropic Haze LLC, the company behind the Yuzu Switch emulator has chosen to settle with Nintendo, paying $2.4 million in damaged to the gaming giant while ceasing the development and distribution of Yuzu.
In their lawsuit, Nintendo claimed that Yuzu was “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale”. Nintendo also accused Yuzu of “illegally circumventing Nintendo’s software encryption. Additionally, Nintendo also blamed Yuzu for the 1 million downloads of a leaked version of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the wild prior to its launch, as Yuzu could be used to play the game on PC. Personally, I wouldn’t blame Yuzu for this, as Yuzu did not cause this game to leak online prior to launch. If Nintendo had tighter security, the game wouldn’t have leaked.
Following the settlement, the Yuzu Nintendo Switch Emulator is effectively dead. The only official statement that Yuzu and Tropic Haze has made on the matter is a generic anti-piracy comment. This statement was likely agreed upon with Nintendo’s legal staff. Alongside Yuzu, the 3DS emulator Citra has also been killed off. This is due to the fact that the developers of Yuzu also created Citra. In a sense, Citra’s death can be seen as collateral damage from Nintendo’s lawsuit.
— yuzu (@yuzuemu) March 4, 2024
Why settle?
Legal battles are expensive, and gain multi-national corporations (like Nintendo) have deep pockets. While Tropic Haze’s $2.4 million settlement is expensive, it is likely a lot less expensive than a long legal battle with Nintendo. Beyond that, failure in a protracted legal battle could cause an immense amount of damage to the game emulation scene. With this settlement, nothing changes for the emulation scene as a while. Yes, Yuzu and Citra are now gone, but no damaging legal precedents have been set to damage the larger world of game emulation.
All-in-all, Tropic Haze has likely made the correct decision to settle with Nintendo early. That said, this early victory could give Nintendo the confidence to target other emulation teams.
Is the death the Yuzu Emulator the end of Switch emulation?
While Yuzu is gone, other Switch emulators remain to fill the void. Ryujinx remains available, and is in active development. So far, Nintendo has not targeted Ryujinx with any legal action, though that may change after Nintendo celebrates their victory against Yuzu.
Thankfully, Ryujinx is less susceptible to legal action than Yuzu. Like most other emulation communities, Ryujinx are stricter than Yuzu when it comes to piracy and copyright. Yuzu’s developers had bragged about successfully emulating leaked games ahead of launch, something that gave Nintendo’s piracy claims a lot of weight.
It remains to be seen what the future holds for the Nintendo emulation scene, but we can hope that Nintendo’s legal fervour will end with Yuzu.
You can join the discussion on the death of the Yuzu Switch Emulator on the OC3D Forums.
