In a short announcement today, the Yuzu developers have stated that, following Nintendo’s lawsuit, they have agreed to discontinue work on their popular Nintendo Switch emulator, and to pay Nintendo the hefty sum of 2.4 million dollars.

Nintendo vs Yuzu

Last Week, Nintendo filed a lawsuit against Yuzu and the company behind it (Tropic Haze LLC), claiming the Switch emulator was “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale“. Although not all claims in the lawsuit looked like a slam dunk (ArsTechnica have a great piece on how strong Nintendo’s case really is), Nintendo seemed to have a case because of how “helpful” Yuzu was in helping to break Nintend Switch game DRMs. Even though the software does not include the Switch decryption keys (the infamous “prod keys”), it does have code to use those keys in order to decrypt DRM-protected games. Furthermore, the help pages, Discord server, and blog of the Yuzu emulator were a massive source of hints, tips, and guides on how to acquire and use all the required elements to decrypt and run Switch games. That, in the eyes of Nintendo’s lawyers, was enough to consider Yuzu, as a whole, as an illegal DRM circumvention tool. The fact that the developers accepted payments for their work via a Patreon membership, was probably the cherry on top. When money’s involved, it doesn’t necessarily make something more illegal, but it certainly makes a claim for damages much easier.

It initially appeared as if the Yuzu team was going to fight back and lawyer up, but it seems this was with the goal of quickly reach an agreement outside of court with Nintendo. In a joint filing with Nintendo, Tropic Haze have agreed to pay Nintendo 2.4 million dollars, and basically comply with all of Nintendo’s claims in the lawsuit (permanent injunction here). The filing is pending a judge’s approval.

The Yuzu emulator website, as well as the project’s github, are now down. Collateral damage to the decision, the citra emulator for Nintendo 3DS, developed by the same folks, has also been taken down.

The Yuzu and Citra websites now only display the following message:

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.

What does this mean for emulation?

This certainly must not have been an easy week for the folks behind the Yuzu emulator. My guess is that even though 2.4 million is an insane amount of money, the Yuzu devs must have been advised that they still had a significant chance to lose if they took this to court. This would have meant even more money to pay, including lawyers fees.

People are now wondering what this means for the legal future of emulators in the US. ArsTechnica say:

While emulator programs are generally protected by US legal precedents protecting reverse engineering, console makers could bring similar DMCA actions against certain emulators that rely on the use of cryptographic keys to break copy protection. But many emulator makers feel that such hardball lawsuits are less likely to be brought against emulators for defunct systems that are no longer selling new hardware or software in significant numbers.

Because this is a settlement out of court, it will not establish a legal precedent in the US. However, it will certainly have a chilling effect on all emulator developers. Ryujinx, the other Switch emulator in town, have not made any official statement on the situation. But now, being the only “viable” alternative for Switch emulation, they must certainly feel that they have a target on their back.

Zelda ToTK running in Ryujinx

Nintendo Switch emulation. What’s Next?

As of this writing, copies of the latest version of Yuzu are fairly easy to find. The dedicated subreddit has a bunch of cloned repositories and download links to binaries (use those binaries at your own risk, some people will likely use the confusion to start distributing malware).

Lots of people are posting alternate download links and mirrors for the last version of yuzu.

But it’s very likely that without a coordinated team at the helm, useful development of the emulator will grind to a halt, or we’ll see dozens of confusing forks, and clearly Yuzu’s future form will not be the powerhouse it used to be. The existing version still is very capable of course, and emulates a lot of existing Switch games very well (for some specific games, playing them on a good PC with Yuzu has actually been reported to be much better than on actual Switch hardware).

There’s also of course Ryujinx, still up and running, which is a very, very competent emulator for the Nintendo Switch. With Ryujinx not pushing decryption tools as hard as Yuzu did, we can only hope that they won’t be Nintendo’s next target. Fingers crossed.

Thanks to Mary-Alice for the tip (and my entire Twitter timeline!)