Nintendo Wins the Lawsuit Against Yuzu Emulator

Nintendo, the gaming company that loves its games more than its fans, has won the lawsuit over one of the available Nintendo Switch emulators used by lots of people. Yuzu, been in development since 2016, was one of the first attempts to reverse engineer the Switch structure and bring the console’s emulation to the PC platform. It was handled quite well, until yesterday, when the main developers released an announcement stating Yuzu project is no more.

The beef between Yuzu and Nintendo has already been steadily known by many since the lawsuit appeared last week. The same could be said the same for other emulators, such as the Wii and Gamecube emulator: Dolphin. Yuzu’s case, however, is different due to Nintendo Switch’s current relevancy to the console market. Most of the Nintendo emulators tend to be the earl consoles, such as NES, SNES, and N64, but Switch is their active console, meaning it being emulated makes them lose profit.

While they are right about Yuzu, Nintendo is known for their questionable take on their own property, going forward to suing people for trying to keep their legacy on other platforms. Unlike other companies, who try their best to bring their old titles to modern hardware, Nintendo never does that, and even if they do it, they tend to charge quite a hefty sum before letting players "enjoy" the experience. Unfortunately, the greediness of Nintendo ends up hurting them in the end by forcing people to find other ways to play their games.

 

The last case of Yuzu ended up in a bitter way, where the creators of the emulator lost the court case and now they are forced to pay up to 2,4 million dollars to cover the damages and lost profit. This case also affects the 3DS emulator by the same group, Citra, therefore 3DS emulator built by the Yuzu team is also getting a shutdown soon. What makes the case rather interesting is Yuzu team did not choose to fight back and accepted the charges right away, because they already knew they were passing the copyright protection of Nintendo.

In a recent event, the Dolphin emulator was also considered to be ported over Steam, but Valve quickly stepped right up to the case and denied their entry. Weirdly enough, Dolphin wasn’t picked by Nintendo even after Valve’s report to Nintendo about the emulator. As for Nintendo Switch emulation, it is currently unknown if someone else wants to step into the game and take responsibility again after what the Yuzu team went through.

Atilla Turan (@burningarrow)
Editor, NoobFeed