Last week, Nintendo filed a lawsuit against Switch emulator Yuzu, blaming the emulator for the mass piracy of 2023’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and declaring that “there is no legal way to use Yuzu to play Nintendo Switch games.” did. Yuzu’s developers have hired a lawyer and are apparently preparing the case for the first legal showdown over emulation in more than 20 years. But today, Yuzu and Nintendo filed a surprise joint motion to resolve the case, with Yuzu developers agreeing to pay Nintendo “monetary relief in the amount of $2.4 million.”
As a result of the settlement, Yuzu’s development will be halted and its distribution will be halted.
It’s a dramatic turn for a case that didn’t seem certain to end in Nintendo’s favor. Lawsuits filed by Sony against Connectix and Bleem emulators in the early 2000s! Both went in the emulator developers’ favor, but advances in technology since then have left a big question mark over how a court would rule on bypassing the Switch’s encryption, something generally prohibited by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Nintendo publicly claimed that Yuzu was “primarily designed to evade technological countermeasures”; This is very specific language that indicates the emulator is in conflict with the DMCA.
It is possible for a judge to decide that circumvention was not the real issue. priority The purpose of the emulator is an act of reverse engineering necessary to play video games. Such a decision would be a huge win for the legality of emulating modern systems; A decision that goes the way of Nintendo will threaten many other emulators. A loss could have been extremely expensive for Yuzu developers, and even a win could have resulted in years of legal fees as the case progressed through trial and appeal. It looks like the emulator developers decided that a quick solution was the safer choice.
Today’s joint motion states: “Defendant and its members acknowledge and agree that the award of monetary damages herein bears a reasonable relationship to the damages, attorneys’ fees, and all costs that the parties may reasonably anticipate being awarded during and after a hearing of this action.” As part of the agreement, Yuzu developers waive their right to appeal the decision and are bound by a permanent injunction that, at least in its current form, essentially marks the death of the emulator. The permanent injunction prevents developers from:
-
“To publicly offer, provide, market, advertise, promote, sell, test, host, clone, distribute or otherwise trade in Yuzu or any source code or features of Yuzu.”
-
“To appoint or transfer, to create new organizations or associations, or to use any other means to circumvent or otherwise evade established prohibitions.” [above]”
The injunction also requires the defendants to stop using the domain name yuzu-emu.org and will hand it over to Nintendo’s control and carry out the “deletion and destruction of all circumvention devices, including all copies of Yuzu” and “all circumvention devices used to develop or use Yuzu” to the best of their ability. Yuzu will be at least officially erased from the internet about.
Update: In a post on the Yuzu Discord, lead developer Bunnei announced that “yuzu and yuzu’s support for Citra has been discontinued, effective immediately.”
The statement continues with strong language ‘We have to say this within the scope of the legal solution’ energy:
“…we now see that these lead to extensive piracy, as our projects can bypass Nintendo’s technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside authorized hardware. In particular, we are deeply disappointed when users use our software to leak game content before it is released.” and ruin the experience for legitimate buyers and fans.
“We have come to the decision that we cannot continue to allow this to happen. Piracy was never our intention, and we believe piracy in video games and video game consoles must end. Starting today, we will be taking our code repositories offline, terminating our Patreon accounts and Discord servers, and shutting down our websites soon. Our actions include, “We hope it will be a small step towards ending the piracy of the works of all creators.”
Of course, any software as widely used as Yuzu will not be easy to completely destroy. The source code has been removed from Github, but archives have already been created and shared among the emulation community. It’s possible that other developers unrelated to the project could continue Yuzu’s work under a new name, but the $2.4 million deal seems likely to have a chilling effect on any future developments that are likely to draw Nintendo’s ire.
The question now is whether Nintendo’s decisive victory here will lead to lawsuits against other emulators, including Yuzu’s rival Ryujinx. Since Nintendo and Yuzu reached a settlement before going to court, the decision has no validity. legal Reflections on how future court cases will decide on emulation and whether it violates the DMCA. But the deal could set in motion a series of lawsuits against other emulators that may not be able to afford the cost of a protracted legal battle with a billion-dollar company.