Nintendo Switch feature

Yuzu is dead and its creators will pay $2.4 million in damages to Nintendo

Last week, Nintendo sued the creators of the Nintendo Switch emulator, Yuzu. Nintendo claimed in its lawsuit that Yuzu was responsible for the illegal downloads of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Moreover, the big “N” claimed that its tech illegally circumvents Nintendo’s software encryption. And from the looks of it, the Yuzu team will have to pay Nintendo $2.4 million in damages.

Not only that but the Court has ordered the team to surrender, and permanently cease to use, the domain name YUZUEMU.ORG. The court has also ordered the destruction by deletion of all circumvention devices, including all copies of Yuzu, all circumvention tools used for developing or using Yuzu, and all copies of Nintendo cryptographic keys. Basically, Yuzu is now officially dead.

Now I don’t know what this could mean for the future of console emulation. I also don’t know whether Nintendo will now go after Ryujinx. What I do know is that this win for Nintendo may have a huge impact on the whole emulation scene.

It will be interesting to see whether Nintendo will now go after Ryujinx. Alongside Yuzu, Ryujinx was able to play A LOT of Nintendo Switch games at launch. So, make sure to back up copies of these emulators while you still can.

It will also be interesting to see whether another Nintendo Switch emulator will rise from the ashes of Yuzu. After all, Yuzu is an open-source emulator. In theory, nothing can stop someone from releasing a clone of it.

And that is that. Nintendo has won this battle!

82 thoughts on “Yuzu is dead and its creators will pay $2.4 million in damages to Nintendo”

  1. the yuzu team have 0 balls
    they are innocent, their emulator have 0 relation with game being leaked
    the leak of zelda totk happened within the retail distribution network of switch games
    they have 30k$ / monthly from patreon, they can win this case

    1. They really can’t: Yuzu allowed, on both their Discord and documentation, discussion of how to break Nintendo’s security for the sake of pirating ROMs, and they foolishly admitted that Tears of the Kingdom was the most played ROM even before the game was officially released. Theoretical legitimate uses don’t matter at that point, since they already endorsed criminal use.

      That said, Nintendo was probably concerned enough about their own argument that they didn’t want to risk an actual court case either: the argument that software can only ever be (essentially) rented has serious problems, and Nintendo probably doesn’t want to risk having to actually explain its rather monopolistic practices under oath.

    2. Yeah, but unfortunately 30K $ per month is considered peanuts in the US juridical system.

      I know because I can speak from experience, since Linux used to be a high-profile target for patent trolls in the early 2000’s when it started to become financially successful in the enterprise markets, while still staying a 100 % open-source project.

      Those legal attacks against Linux only stopped once the OIN (Open Invention Network) was founded, which is a collaboration of the biggest tech companies in the world, including Microsoft.

      I truly wish we would all live in a world where money doesn’t equal power, but it is what it is…

    3. Unless you are willing to give Yuzu the millions they would need to fight this then you are the ballless wonder …..

      Easy to say when it’s not your money on the line …. The fact they settled out of court for $2.4 million should be a huge clue as to how much it would cost to fight this and win

      1. Man, burguer justice sure is nice… Just fork over some millions of dollars and you can defeat Nintendo…

    4. $30k is what they would need daily for one lawyer out of several to win that case. Very few if any won with Nintendo. Actually looking at Nintendo history i can see they only lost to EU once and that’s that. Nintendo already won several cases against emulators so im sure its impossible to win against them because truth is, they are in right even if it sucks for us gamers.
      Zelda had nothing to do with it, just read the damn lawsuit it clearly states Yuzu was sued for breaking and distributing decryption keys not for piracy or leaking anything its just Johns fantasy.

      1. It wasn’t John’s fantasy. A filed document showed a bold text which states that Zelda TotK has been downloaded more than a million times because of this emulator causing millions worth of damages to the company.

    5. They are not innocent. They HUGELY F*KED THIS UP.

      1. They had a Patron
      2. They openly talked about piracy on discord
      3. they USED HACKED switch official Switch SDKs and kept it within google drive
      4. They promoted the leaked games and provided specially patched version for money.

      They WENT WAY TOO FAR and caused damage to the emulator community.

  2. I told you people sooner or later the greedy yuzu devs will get what they deserve and here it is happening in our very eyes , they should have thought better keeping that patreon page alive

    i just hope this wont snowball and affect other emulators because we are at the doors of switch 2 reveal and we need emulation magic to make that happen

      1. yeah i read about it and Nintendo signed a deal specifically to deal with the games ID’s and it looks like its randomly generated with another layer to prevent games from being booted , looks like they gonna start doing that on Switch 2

      2. yeah i read about it and Nintendo signed a deal specifically to deal with the games ID’s and it looks like its randomly generated with another layer to prevent games from being booted , looks like they gonna start doing that on Switch 2

        1. I am not surprised one bit, greed is the driving force of Craptendo after all.

          They will sell cartridges in 2050.

      3. Wait a minute… Are u implying that it won’t be possible to circumvent it? As in because it’s emulation on an image of the game, you can’t crack Denuvo? idk really

        1. i am telling you what they are saying, i dont know how it will work out, but it will detect that you are not running on an actual console and stop it, this is the idea.

    1. I don’t know the full patreon details.
      But I see no harm in a patreon for their work.
      It would be bad if they outright charged people for downloading the App. But they didn’t, as far as I know, the downloads were free

  3. i once again cant state how much i hate nitendo and i am glad i dont like their games.

    They make weak consoles, people emulate them get better graphics NO says nitendo you must play it on the trashbox. They whine that people download roms of old games that they dont re-release but they dont re-release or remaster them anyway, its surreal to me how up its own bum this company is.

    So what does this mean that emulation is no longer legal grey area?

  4. In more positive news there’s been the announcement of huge job losses at Sony and EA.

    The virtue signalling woke clowns at Digital Foundry are very emotional about it. One’s blaming muh capitalism and the other two are saying they’re feeling “angry”. LOL

    1. If those people are truly talented, then they can always work for Valve, who are always looking out for exceptional candidates.

  5. Nintendo is a ireal POS company! The worst!
    It’s sad that anyone supports them. The people have the power to destroy them, yet they are still operational.

  6. If you’re curious as to how petty this is, according to wikipedia, nintendo’s revenue for 2023 is over 13.9 billion USD. So this 2.4 million USD in payments is like a revenue increase of……. 0.017%.

  7. It’d be nice to get some real journalism with quotes and references instead of this 16yo AI written stuff, but ok then. Have to go to a better site for more details but first impression is that the bullying worked and
    you think judges aren’t easily bribed and controlled by these megacorpo
    scum? Of course they are, part of the jumasontrannee cult like all the
    rest, the various cartels, monopolies and syndicates are full of snakes
    who play their games.

    Lesson here is that they should have kept
    the donations amount private, nintendont sees that those shysters calc
    that it’s worth the bribes to judges to take them down, another aspect
    is to remain largely anonymous, putting any faith in free and open laws
    about emulation and such is not going to save you from these gangsters, those laws don’t apply to them if they’re big enough, only to small fry and especially to poor and individuals who aren’t connected. Money makes the laws and money determines any enforcement.

    BTW here’s the judge

    DisHon. John J. McConnell, Chief Judge
    United States District Court, District of Rhode
    Island

    1. Mr. McConnell sounds like a great irish american citizen. Newport , Rhode Island is a beautiful destination

    1. they settled for 2,4m, its nothing for yuzu team, they made much much more so why would they risk loosing more. Its just business.

      1. That actually have sense. Bayonetta 3 was working bad month after launch even yuzu had ungodly level of donations. With that money they should have team of emergency coders especially trained to fix new games in shortest period after release

    2. Yes, they settled the lawsuit.
      I’m guessing maybe because although emulation is protected, bypassing of encryption that they were doing may not be.

      Overall very bizarre.

    3. They settled quickly because the last thing they wanted was to go through the discovery process where they would have to give Nintendo lawyers access to every last aspect of their lives including going to their business AND homes and looking through everything you own …. Your bank accounts ….. your taxes ….. what size underwear you have …… EVERYTHING

  8. I think this is fake the site is still up the early access i just updated and this was to quick to get to court it would take months.

    1. are you playing dumb? go to their official discord they literally shutting down everything in few days

    1. the issue is that they were cashing on Totk hype and putting builds behind a paywall and since every dumb content creator gave them publicity they were lavishing monthly over 40k $ and Nintendo noticed that and got mad that others making money using their brand

      1. $40k a month is Chump Change for a business, that’s only $480,000 a year and after expenses and then splitting the money several ways I doubt any of them were actually making $40k a year. There a lots of full time risk free jobs that pay more than this, in fact all my employees make at least twice that.

        1. As long as emu is free, companies are ok, as soon as there are money involved (any amount), the game is on. Yuzu flew too close to the sun, is all.

  9. I haven’t used yuzu in years the last few major releases were always packed with ryujinx but reading more details looks like it was an LLC anyways so no one is going to lose a house over this, bankrupt and no one loses anything. Also from other places yuzu looked to be fairly brazen about stuff and using paywalls and such idk looks like they weren’t too smart about it. I think the early game leaks like TOTK will continue from this, nintendont seems to not get that their tactics make them hated and only fuel this sort of thing. How long was yuzu up and making thousand per month and what was the investment cost? ROI with a bankruptcy and no pay involved was probably worth it. Switch 2 games and such will be leaked early for switch emus and it goes on. New emus will pop up.

  10. Gee that sure sounds EXACTLY what I said was going to happen

    When are you young people who think you know everything going to learn that you cannot teach Experience, it can only be acquired over time

  11. to be expected, not the first time not the last time. As always nintendo emu scene will go deep underground for some time but they will return. Its not first rodea for anyone involved.
    Also you people should stop crying so much, if you were in place of Nintendo you would do the same. Its pretty obvious they will do what they can to protect their assets. It is what it is.

    I only want to know what about Rujinx? They had different goals then yuzu and different wording on their page so maybe Nintendo has no way to latch onto something with them. Oh figured it out, yuzu broken decryption keys, Ryujinx did not so they are safe.

  12. To be honest, this should just be a wake up call to Nintendo to how much potential customers they lose in the PC market.

    Anyway, I haven’t played any Nintendo game in a long time but its always a shame to see fan run project shut down by the company they are a fan of.

    As far as I know, Yuzu was completely free. This guys were not charging anyone for the software.
    Hopefully the Ryujinx team takes notes and starts to protect itself early. And Hopefully Sony doens’t take this as precedence and goes against PS emulators too

  13. just asking if you owned a company would you not try to protect your assets if you had the means to do so ? i can understand Nintendo’s point of view here and morally they are correct in my opinion. taking money away from the artists is not good. At the same time “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

    1. I wouldn’t do this crap. CDProjekt won’t as well and they are fine. Even with the whole Cyberpunk fiasco.

      So to answer your question, yes I won’t do it, but at the same time I’m not a Japanee still selling cartridges in 2024.

      Goodwill goes a long way and console exclusivity is so 2006.

        1. That never stopped, they aggressively C&D any Cyberpunk downloads, while basically no other game dev bothers except for shittendo ofc.

          1. Is this something they do only on certain countries? I never got any letter by pirating their games…

  14. Thank you for your service, Yuzu devs. I hope emulation devs pay attention going forward, try to bullet proof your project from America style “justice”, whatever it takes.

  15. Right now the only viable way to continue this is from a terrorist state such as ruSSia. Which actively encourages pirating the stuff of western satanic degenerates. At least until you get a knock on your door to enlist and become part of a meat wave.

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