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After settling with the creator of Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the people who made the Yuzu emulator for the Nintendo Switch owe Nintendo $2.4 million. This is because they were sued last week over the open-source emulator. Court documents show that both Nintendo and Tropic Haze, the company behind Yuzu, asked for a final judgment and permanent injunction on Monday.
The creator of the ‘YUZU’ Nintendo Switch emulator settled a lawsuit with Nintendo for $2.4M pic.twitter.com/A1FKNQByAL
— Dexerto (@Dexerto) March 4, 2024
This came after Nintendo accused the Yuzu makers of copyright infringement, breaking Nintendo’s Switch protections, and selling those breaking technologies as Yuzu, among other things.
The settlement has not yet been approved by a court, though.
Yuzu is a free emulator for the Nintendo Switch that came out in 2018, a few months after the Nintendo Switch came out. This is software that lets people play Nintendo Switch games on their computers or phones. Nintendo used Yuzu to claim that people could play early copies of the game, including Tears of the Kingdom, which was used as evidence in its case.
Nintendo said that because of the stolen copies, more than a million people played the game before it came out. People have stolen or shared games from Yuzu, but Nintendo went after the company because the emulator is one of the few ways to play those games.
Besides paying the money, the deal says Tropic Haze has to stop all work on Yuzu. It can’t sell it in any way, and it can’t promote it on its website or social media. Yuzu will also have to give up its website address.
Bunnei, the company that made Yuzu, said in a Discord message that everything connected to Yuzu would be taken down.
“We never meant for piracy to happen, and we think it should stop with video games and video game consoles.” As of today, our code repositories will no longer be accessible. We will also be closing our Patreon and Discord services and, soon, our websites, Bunnei wrote. “Our actions are meant to be a small step towards ending the theft of all creators’ works.”
In Stardew Valley, fishing is known for being one of the most annoying things to do. It is hard to learn because it is tricky and needy. But with some help from a famous author, Polygon’s Simone de Rochefort learned to love this annoying feature. When we look at how fishing works in games like Animal Crossing:
New Horizons, Dredge, and Moonglow Bay, we can see how Ernest Hemingway’s many stories about fishing accurately reflect how people feel and what they do.
These are the websites, Patreon pages, and GitHub sources that have been taken down for Yuzu and the Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra. The Discord chat is still up and running.
When asked for a statement on the settlement, a Nintendo representative told Polygon to talk to the Entertainment Software Association. Lawyers for the company that made the software did not answer a request for comment.
The Tears of the Kingdom distributor is known for being very careful with its authors’ ideas. Nintendo has been sued several times against sites that pirate games, including RomUniverse. In one case, it was given more than $2 million in damages.
Nintendo was also known to go after Gary Bowser, who was accused of hacking the Nintendo Switch and was caught and charged with selling hacks for the Switch. Now that Bowser is out of jail, he still owes Nintendo $10 million. While he was in jail, he paid Nintendo $175 with money he made by working in the kitchen and library.
Emulation is once again the subject of a discussion, this time about whether the act of emulating is inherently illegal. Fans of copying don’t believe that of course: Yuzu and other emulators are seen by many as an important way to keep video games alive. Nintendo doesn’t agree.
Update: One of Yuzu’s creators, Bunnei, posted a message on the group’s Discord page about the deal. In it, they said that all Yuzu code, Patreon accounts, and Discord servers would be shut down. We added part of this comment to this story’s update. The whole message is here:
Hi yuz-ers and Citra fans!
We’re writing to let you know that Yuzu and its support for Citra will no longer be available from today on.
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.
Stay tuned to our website silentnews.org for more website.
