Forums / Media / Video Games

“Source”:https://nintendoeverything.com/nintendo-suing-creators-of-switch-emulator-yuzu/

While it is true emulation and emulators aren’t illegal, it sounds like what happened here is the people behind Yuzu flew too close to the sun by opening a Patreon so they can make money for working on the emulator, which throws out the common argument that they “wouldn’t be profiting from piracy,” as another huge mark against Yuzu is they saw a massive surge in Patreon supporters when Tears of the Kingdom leaked pre-release, and it sounds like Nintendo has proof that indeed more than a million copies of the game we’re pirated around that time.

I feel like it really needs to be said that if you’re making an emulator or fan game then asking for money without any approval will absolutely get you in a company’s crosshairs.

Why are these people so stupid?
Why give Nintendo enough solid ground to take legal action against you?
Emulators are Legal according to US law BUT its as long as you have proof of ownership of original hardware (That's why most emulators ask for a BIOS in order to avoid problems with official companies) and you are not making money from them (why do you think that when they ask for donations they have to be vague enough to avoid what the Yuzu developers just did?)
I've said it one and I'll say it again:
Companies are not your friends but if they DMCA (sue) you when you profit from their IPs (hardware) without permission by forcing people to pay for your mods (emulator) you have no one to blame but yourself.

I have a hard time seeing how the Yuzu team could be held responsible for the actions of their users. They can't control what their users do with their software. Their emulator can't be designed on a whim to be non functional because it might be misused. It can only realistically be designed to indiscriminately process the files it's given by the user. How is anyone supposed to determine and prevent if someone is running pirated games on their software? By checking for duplicate unique game IDs? No. That's not even useful for the emulator functionality. Blaming an emulator for having bad actors is as faulty of a lawsuit as trying to hold car companies responsible for the crimes committed by their customers. Another issue is that people can play pirated games on a real Nintendo switch, they don't need Yuzu to do that.

I think that's a critical point where Nintendo's suit flops. They are pointing fingers at people paying money to support an emulator's development. They can claim their patreon "Surged when they saw x game got leaked or after y game was released" but that's just running off of circumstantial evidence at best and assumptions at worst. Saying that giving instructions on how to get your own key files as a circumvention is illegal is asinine. Reverse engineering a product you own to access its files isn't illegal, and giving the instructions to others on how to do so isn't either.

Aaand yuzu is ceasing the development.

With the most stock response possible.

Why do all those who get C&D'd by Nintendo create a response that doesn't sound human and sounds like something Nintendo wants them to write?

Why can't they just say "Fuck Nintendo!" for once?

Not only this, where are all the financial losses from Ninendo? Where is the proof that Nintendo is doing poorly and its games are selling horribly due to piracy?

I know it might be tinfoil hat theory, but I do think all those notices are written By Nintendo themselves.

"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. "

I mean, I do not believe that yuzu creators would have said that ever.

Also, Yuzu was open source. It seems Tropic Haze, (Yuzu's LLC) made this response, not the developers. It seems likely they folded because settling for 2.4 million would be potentially cheaper than continuing to fight the suit or losing it.

Also, this to me confirms the Nintendo Switch 2 is unquestionably the next system they release. All my doubts vanished after this lawsuit appeared. The switch 2 must be backwards compatible with the switch and because of that a switch emulator coud potentially be adapted to run games from their next system, which also means that the switch 2's processor is very likely from nividia and probably already exists on the market

We have Ryujinx for now, but the loss of Citra as well was certainly painful. Life lesson learned for the emulation community: don't incentivize paid emulator development while the system is still releasing games on the market, and especially don't promote paid development if there has been a history of games leaking before the official launch date.

> I have a hard time seeing how the Yuzu team could be held responsible for the actions of their users.

They promoted jailbreaking your switch to dump games, which is against the DMCA. (There's an excemption for jailbreaking phones, tablets, and certain other devices, but not game consoles or media players.)

Emulator developers probably need to incorporate in a jurisdiction like France where there isn't any law against breaking copy protection. This is how VLC was able to get away with breaking DVD copy protection.

I also just saw the twitter post on Twitter showing one of their uses directly linking Xenoblade Chronicles. Their discord was supposed to ban any talk of that sort but the patreon chat seemingly wasn't as regulated or had overlooked such instances. That was poor moderation on the discord's behalf, and it also seems that they had the switch sdk on them and a stash of roms. If I had known that, I wouldn't have even bothered to try and defend Yuzu earlier.

Dumping games to create a backup wasn't the issue so much as their argument for the product.keys dump. I don't think the judge will sign off on that part, but we'll have to wait and see where that goes.

I have another theory. Perhaps Nintendo took action just for easy free money.

>Not only this, where are all the financial losses from Ninendo? Where is the proof that Nintendo is doing poorly and its games are selling horribly due to piracy?

Nintendo's legal team apparently was able to provide evidence that 1 million downloads of Tears of the Kingdom happened pre-release and 1 million more were attempted, which for a corporation makes for a very easy argument to say "this proves we lost 1 million potential sales."

Yuzu apparently also locked better updated versions of the emulator behind a paywall which I thought was a big no-no among emulation and modding communities, as I saw people criticize the modders who locked Capcom mods behind Patreon paywalls and that one dude who made a Pokemon mod for Palworld also had it behind a paywall.

The source code for Patreon builds was freely available so anyone could build it themselves if they wanted, but it's still flying a bit too close to the sun.

I'm more heartbroken over Citra shutting down

IT DIDN'T DESERVE SUCH A FATE

After my second 3ds sd card got corrupted, I narrowly managed to salvage my corrupt data and decrypt my super mystery dungeon save file. Version 2104 is the last compiled build and I guess I'm going to have to finish that version on the final release of citra. Maybe someone will pick up that torch, but I wouldn't expect it to happen any time soon.

Sorry for bringing this thread up out of the blue, but I think this is very warrant.
https://aftermath.site/pokemon-lawyer-cease-desist-fan-project-pikachu-movie
the article is about a journalist asking questions for the former lawyer for Pokemon, Don McGowan, stated that what he and the other members who DMCA certain Pokemon fangames. truth of the matter is that they just stumble upon them randomly by well-known article sites. they wouldn't even act immediately on notice, they wait and see if the developers gets fundings off of their IP as well.

It really goes to show that for GameFreak (and to an extension to Nintendo) would only go out for these projects if their both been shove in their faces and being monetize in the process.
so really, the blame goes to the loudmouths who constantly spotlighted these things. surely, the devs from YuZu and other affiliates wouldn't learn their lesson and double down on the same mistakes as before. Right?

I am shocked and flabbergasted, what a shocking turn of events that no one ever saw coming. Truly this is surprising news.