Nintendo has won its lawsuit against Switch emulator creator Yuzu and will receive $2.4 million from the developers, forcing them to shut down the free emulator service.
The gaming company's legal victory comes as it has a history of not just stopping video game pirates but also ruining their lives. Nintendo's lawsuit against Yuzu came last week, and on Monday, the free emulator's developers agreed to shut down the website entirely and pay up.
Nintendo Wins Switch Emulator Lawsuit
On top of Yuzu, Citra, which is another free and open-source emulator for Nintendo's 3DS that the same company runs, will also be shut down. In a Monday post, Bunnei, a lead contributor on the emulators, said that they were informing the public that Yuzu and its support of Citra were being discontinued, effective immediately.
He said that they started the projects in good faith and out of passion for Nintendo and the company's consoles and games, adding that they never intended to cause harm. As per Gizmodo, Tropic Haze, the developers behind the emulators, were video game lovers and made products to enable greater access to the company's games.
However, the court said that the operations involved piracy and theft. Now, the website yuzu-emu.org will be immediately transferred to Nintendo, and the emulators' creators are legally barred from creating anything similar to it in the future.
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The developers behind the emulator did not put up much of a fight in the highly controversial legal battle with the gaming company. The code repositories behind Citra and Yuzu have already been removed from GitHub. While the open-sourced project can be replicated by other actors, doing so could land someone else in a similar situation to Tropic Haze.
Following the lawsuit, users in the subreddit r/yuzu rushed to quickly download and save the latest versions of Yuzu before they were removed permanently. The subreddit, which was seen to have more than 86,000 members, was then filled with farewell messages to the beloved platform on Monday.
Yuzu To Pay Nintendo $2.4 Million
It remains unclear whether or not the results of the lawsuit mark the literal end of Citra or Yuzu since copies of both emulators and their source code are available somewhere online. Some supporters specifically mentioned backing up the Yuzu code after the initial announcement of Nintendo's lawsuit, according to The Verge.
Additionally, it is unclear whether or not the result of the lawsuit could impact other emulators beyond Citra and Yuzu. One of the biggest questions if Yuzu chose to fight the lawsuit in court is if the emulator actually circumvented Nintendo's protections.
This is because the emulator itself does not contain Nintendo's keys, as Yuzu is a "bring-your-own-BIOS" emulator. A business attorney who hosts the Virtual Legality podcast, Richard Hoeg, said that the good news is that the settlements are not legal determinations, so they are not legally precedential.
Before the latest legal challenge, Nintendo had won several lawsuits targeting pirated game sites such as RomUniverse. Polygon said that the gaming company was paid more than $2 million in damages in that particular incident.
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