Nintendo Switch Emulator, YUZU, 'Banned', $2.4 Million to Nintendo

Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu to shut down, pay $2.4 million to settle lawsuit from Nintendo

"Yuzu is a free and open source emulator that makes it possible to run Nintendo Switch games on Windows, Linux, and Android devices. First released in 2018, the software has been under constant development since then (the Android port was released less than a year ago).

[BluntyTV]

Small correction, I said the R4 cart thing was about 3DS... it was about the NDS at the time ... my point of course still stands

[Funem]

Yuzu shot themselves in the foot because by joining their Patreon, you could get a more up to date version of the emulator patched for the latest games, the one that I think got Nintendo's attention was they patched Tears of the Kingdom, before it was even released and Yuzu made a big deal out of it, hoping you would join their Patreon, at a cost, to enable you to play it. So not only were they patching it to remove bugs, they patched if for a game that no-one should even have had access to, so they must have pirated the game, or got a pirated copy, early enough to to patch it in the emulator. There is no way they could defend that in court without admitting piracy themselves. This meant that the massive amount of copies of tears of the kingdom that were downloaded (and that number was huge) and played prior to release were lost sales for Nintendo, so they got payment for damages but they also had the leverage to remove the emulator in one go, with little to no fight being put up aginst it. Yuzu themselves gave Nintendo the ability to close them down by involving themselves in piracy. Tears of the Kingdom was mentioned in the Lawsuit.

[EternalSaber]

This reminds me of Sony PlayStation VS bleem! Remember bleem? Even though bleem won those cases, they went bankrupt from the legal costs.

[treyhay]

Yuzu team was idiots. Nintendo would have never went after them if they didnt have a Paetreon, charging people to purchase the emulator

[IrrelevantBecauseReasons]

They are the worst when it comes down to these kind of things. They say its to make an example of people! FEAR THE GODS!!!
This is one of those cases I wished their shot backfired and they were the ones that had to pay the emulator guys and the law finally made emulators legal.

All that money Nintendo uses in court, how about making a more powerful device? Invest that money on the console? Improve their services? Be more pro consumer.
Also why do I need to be subcribed to their sh*tty online service in order to play older snes titles? (that also run on emulation btw)
Why can't we just buy and keep those games?
They don't care about game preservation and maybe that's why some people emulate games.

I don't really care about their exclusives with the exception of 2 games, xenoblade and fire emblem, but I can live without those.
Good thing nowadays you have lots of good games across all platforms, and there's also other portable devices like the Steam Deck or Rog Ally that can play most of them with better performance.

[StarfighterJohansson]

I agree with everything said in this video! I do have one question though, and that's regarding the "emulators aren't a crime, it's what you do with them" thing. I've heard several versions of this before and I'm struggling to really understand it. Sure, emulators can be used to run homebrew stuff, but they're almost exclusively used for piracy - that's their main affordances in many cases. How do I, then, use this argument without feeling like I'm being a bit sneaky?

[Gamesta]

I had never heard of Yuzu until about 30 minutes ago.

[mdem]

This is similar situation that happened with tachiyomi not long ago, kakao sent a C&D at the dev team and it just wasn't worth the fight so they closed up shop.
In this case it's just an Android app so it's easy to keep dev going via different teams and it has many forks too, so it's still around.

[Uncreative]

Closest thing in the law as shown @4:40 to Nintendo Games being exempt from having back-ups made would be that Section (4)(b) which states that it is illegal to make a copy if the copyright owner designs the program to be unable to be copied without modifying the program. Which would have to be argued that: the system is part of the program, and the modification being any software used in conjunction either on the console or pc to extract said program (game). If there was an external device to rip the games without needing a Switch console there would absolutely be no leg to stand on I think.
Although I thought the focus of the settlement was that of all the tools/software that was made to acquire the games or the product keys and not really the emulator itself besides it being commonly used for Switch piracy.
idk I'm not too well versed in the story and am not a lawyer

[mjc]

I don't think Nintendo would have won either. Emulators have been ruled to be legal several times.
But I don't blame Tropic Haze for settling. You nailed it: Lawsuits aren't always about who's right. It's about who can afford to keep paying for lawyers and keep the case going. And Nintendo can absolutely outspend some emulator developers and utterly ruin them before any verdict is handed down. Nintendo doesn't have to be right (they probably aren't), they just have to have money. And we all know they do.

It's crazy how many people actually expected Tropic Haze to fight Nintendo. "Oh just open a GoFundMe for it" hahaha that's cute. That would cover a little of the suit... Not nearly enough to reach a verdict. GoFundMe would just delay the eventual settlement. Big respect to the developers for not doing one, taking people's money to burn it on a case they still wouldn't be able to afford to win.

Anyway, glad I downloaded Yuzu last week and Citra as soon as I heard the news that Cirta is going away under the settlement too.

[gamespro]

Do you know if it will cause problems for the channel that posts videos of Nintendo games recorded on YUZU?

[duhmez]

The funny thing is, the DMCA specifically allows th ebackup for archive purposes, if the owner of the media choses to do so. BUt NIntendo pretends not to have read this part.

[MystM]

I really hope the games industry collapses at this point, i actively want it

[pilksuk]

I'm not ashamed to admit that after starting my playthrough of pokemon legends arceus on switch and the janky graphics annoying the hell out of my OCD brain I ended up playing it on YUZU so I could upscale and smooth things out...

[duhmez]

Perhaps a legal grey area, but the dmca clearly forbids crackjing encryption, and Yuzu, whena user added key, does indeed decrypt the roms. Ninteno would have a strong legal argument here, luckily this is settled so no new legal precedent has been set. Who knows if they would win. Smarter emulation would have been to only play not encrypted roms thenit is not their fault if the people somehow "find" decrypted roms on their own

[duhmez]

Emulators are not just strictly 100% legal all the itme, they are only legal if they do not do illegal things, like being bundled with ilegal roms, or using someone else's code rather than reverse engineered etc.

[alexprach]

Many influencers don't like it but they won't put their money down to pay for this. There must be one lawyer who could just get funded by all these influencers to just bring this to court to a conclusion. Nintendo is not bigger than the internet, influencers could easily create a charity and do it, but it would make it harder for sponsors to sponsor them, it's just too much effort for too much risk. It's always easier to just complain about it and not actually do anything about it.
Yuzu was already on the bad side of a big chunk of the emulator community so they already lost support, which made them a "soft" target as you said, they knew the etiquette and probably care more about the money than actually game preservation which was smart why Nintendo targeted them.

[toshironikko]

I think there were some things yuzu was doing that might have shown up in a court case like specifically selling decryption keys.

My opinion on the matter is emulators like yuzu should be allowed to exist - and besides the slow roll out of games on subscription services like Nintendo Online/Playstion plus/Gamepass there's no way to give the companies money to own older games so roms are in alot of cases the only way to play them.

What i would find interesting is if Nintendo or another company would partner with a rom/emulator site to let them sell the roms but the company gets a cut of the sales and it would be a legal way of downloading roms (I doubt this would ever happen)

[ricardoneaves]

There will always be other emulators and they will get bullied by nintendo its a never ending cycle honestly

[tuongnguyenmanh]

Nintendo can't stand yuzu anymore bc so many handheld PC with strong IGPU are borned .