After a sudden lawsuit from Nintendo at the end of February, Nintendo Switch Emulator Yuzu is shutting down permanently. Its creators will pay the Super Mario company $2.4 million USD in damages and cease all activity regarding emulation of the Nintendo Switch and any associated services.
This news comes from the official Yuzu Twitter/X account, which posted the following statement this afternoon:
— yuzu (@yuzuemu) March 4, 2024
The statement can also be read below in its entirety:
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.
Nintendo filed a lawsuit against Yuzu at the end of February alleging that the emulator had caused a significant loss of sales for many of the company’s titles, including The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which Nintendo claimed had been downloaded over one million times before it even launched. Nintendo’s lawyers are infamous for taking down unofficial content related to their products with speed and precision, so it’s surprising that it took this long for them to come after Yuzu.
The creators of Yuzu will also fork over a whopping $2.4 million USD in damages to Nintendo as part of this process. This amount was agreed upon by both parties according to court documents, but that’s a significant chunk of cash for the developers to have to pay. It’s likely that attempting to challenge Nintendo in court would have cost them far more, hence the quick agreement to the conditions.
It’s unfortunate that Yuzu is shutting down. We obviously don’t condone piracy here at MP1st, but emulation is a very important part of game preservation. Tools such as Yuzu ensure that games remain playable long after official support for them has ended and their hardware has grown outdated. Without these tools, price gouging and the loss of specific media as a whole is not only likely, but arguably inevitable.
As of time of reporting, Yuzu’s website is still up, though all of the software’s download links have been scrubbed from their page. We’ll be sure to update readers if the situation develops any further.
Source: US Court
Related MP1st Reading:
SO they settled out of court and came to an agreement and admitted that it was being used for piracy.