The Day Emulation Died.

The Nintendo Yuzu Switch emulator drama has been talked about a lot, but so many details have been missed and misunderstood. Did my best to bring together the history, legality, and impact of what happened here.

Random source dump:

[selkenshin]

No, emuilation's not dead. Don't let Nintendo think they've won $h1t

[emufan]

All code used in yuzu early access builds was publicly accessible. EA was simply a convenient installer, you could easily fetch all relevant PRs and make a local build

[mrlionX]

*The Day Yuzu Died* I fixed it. Emulation is not going to die. Lets be frank here, the monetization for Yuzu was blatantly obvious, not many people want to admit it. That's mainly why they got in trouble. Not only that but they did some pretty questionable decisions, such as contracting an actual tunnel service for multiplayer. If it wasn't for all this they would still be going.

[Person-who-exists]

Jokes on Nintendo, as soon as I saw the lawsuit, I cloned their repo and distributed it to a bunch of places

[AcuraAddicted]

It didn't and won't actually die.

[commentinglife]

It seems every couple of years we get this claim that emulators are dead, most often because Nintendo threatens to sue someone and they capitulate cause they don't have the money to fight. However, since Nintendo has never actually gone into court to prove their legal claim, the idea that somehow they know the law is false - just as it was when they sued back in the 90s over the Game Genie and lost that case. The problem for Nintendo is that eventually one of these emulator makers is going to be in a country where Nintendo's threats have no validity and they will have to contend with an actual fight. Nintendo may win a couple battles over the years but the masses are like a hydra; every strike creates two more programmers willing to go to extremes to fight back just to spite their predatory practices!

[famu]

Hearing Yuzu being discontinued was already bad enough on its own, but I was devastated to hear the news about Citra being discontinued as well. I hope we can see an emulator project actually collaborate with a big corporation (Valve, perhaps?) so that an actually fair legal battle can take place.

[tech-bore]

"The Day Emulation Died" Either this is clickbait, or you really don't understand the emulation/modding communities very well. You really think emulation is just going to roll over and die because of a single setback?

[polocatfan]

emulation didn't die. they settled out of court. no precedents were changed.

[daruna]

something that everyone is missing with this case, including you in this video, is that >>>the entire premise of the suit<<< rests on the fact that yuzu (and ryujinx!!!) engages in at-runtime or near-runtime decryption of the encrypted game files through the use of the prod.keys cryptography keys. this directly violates the DMCA carveout that explicitly forbids the circumvention of copy protection (important to note that citra allowed for an option to run pre-decrypted roms).

going forward, if emulator devs want to cut litigious companies off at the knees, they will have to require the user to source pre-decrypted roms on their own. sure, this act of decrypting the game files without authorization is still illegal, but it's up to the user to break the law instead of the emulator (and by extension, the devs) doing so, and the user is nigh-unstoppable thanks not only to being effectively infinite, but also by not having nintendo/sony/et al monitoring their actions on their computer to see if/when they decrypt a cart dump.

again, this really REALLY bears repeating: everything else about the suit - from the intense malding about how emulators can ONLY be used for ILLEGAL PIRACY, to the pearl clutching at the relatively pitiful monthly income from a patreon, and everything in between - is meant to obfuscate and make nintendo look as violated as possible, while also making the yuzu/citra devs look as bad as possible. the activation of myriad uninformed fanboys adding even more noise to the situation is a happy side effect for nintendo. Connectix/bleem proved that the for-profit sale of an emulator of a then-current system, without authorization, on competing platforms was >>>entirely legal<<< and had no bearing whatsoever on the case. any claims to the contrary is utterly meritless.

if it weren't for the act of circumventing encryption, team yuzu could be as happy as a pig in shit writing their code and nintendo could not legally do a damn thing about it. if you want even more verification that this is the actual crux of the case, all you have to do is look at the yuzu devs' statement: they directly state that the wrong they engaged in was in circumventing copy protection.

[Fupicat]

I think one of the main reasons Nintendo is so litigious, that hasn't been cited, is that they are *solely* a gaming company. Their main competitors are Sony and Microsoft, two huge tech companies that basically sell their consoles as a combo of hardware and service. Nintendo is also a massive company, but their value lies entirely in their IPs. They dont have a "strong emotional attachment" to their new releases, they have a strong financial incentive to keep pumping their IPs, because that is all they have. That is why they can get away with making underpowered systems every time, because their massively popular franchises are exclusive to them, and that's why they fight tooth and nail to discourage anyone from making them more accessible.

[hadesangelos]

Sony v bleem definitively decided over 20 years ago that emulation is legal even for current systems, section 117 of the copyright act allows for "archival" purposes and everything else is semantics

[Noliving]

lol, gamecube was more powerful than a ps2, in fact it was closer in power to the xbox than it was to the ps2. RE4 proves, just do a screenshot comparison between ps2 and gamecube. The primary issue is that these emulators are using cracked security to get around the DRM, that is why they are in hot water.

[TheJadeFist]

Decryption isn't exactly illegal. Infact hasn't Nintendo lost that case before? I think, if we think back to the NES days when other companies like Tengen made games not licenses by Nintendo that bypassed, locked on a real NES cart to pass through and even ones that faked the signature for the lock out chip, Nintendo lost those law suits if memory serves correctly, they couldn't stop the games being made, this is the same exact thing.

[OdaSwifteye]

You're getting a thumbs down for being overdramatic.

[Tor-Erik]

The emulators are not dead. It's it on my hard drive. Suck it, Nintendo!

[Refresh]

Boycott Nintendo. Make them lose far more than they gained from this lawsuit.

[bugrasevinc]

I am playing Mario Kart right now...










ON MY PC!!!

[MobileDecay]

The Gamecube was more powerful than the PS2.

[gempura]

Nintendo thinks it can erase emulation from the world when all they are doing is giving it a spotlight, which lets more people look into piracy and contributing to emulation.