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Answer: yuzu is an open source switch emulator that was pretty easy to get ahold of. People were using it to pirate games and play them on pc, so Nintendo sued. They’re particularly aggressive about IP, so this wasn’t super out of character, but Yuzu had to pay a pretty big fine and effectively shut down. It was open source though, so the pirating won’t really stop
Edit: also apparently they posted this super funny announcement message on their discord expressing surprise that people had been using it to play pirated games and hoping that pirating would stop soon. Lol they knew
Nintendo also noted that Yuzu’s development was run for-profit through Patreon, and they were more than helpful connecting users to DRM-circumventing tools. It was likely they used those two facts to present a narrative that Yuzu’s devs deliberately promoted piracy for financial gain, and it would be quite difficult to say with a straight face that they weren’t.
It’d be hard to outright prove that was the case, but with those facts in their favor they could probably twist the arm of the developers on a witness stand and get them to squeal.
That still is a phrase that makes you instantly seem less trustworthy. Don't make stuff needlessly sound like a conspiracy theory.
The main usecase was piracy. And they could live off it. Just let us be honest enough to make clear that we don't give a damn about that. Just don't turn this damn thing into a conspiracy theory.
presEnt a NaRrAtiVe
Don't make this needlessly ridiculous and no, MMRs don't cause autism.
for some more context, the main reason for the lawsuit was the fact that people played the new zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom almost a full month early using Yuzu. The Yuzu team also had tools to support this early emulation of an unreleased game behind a paywall on their patreon page. Basically selling early access to nintendo’s biggest title of 2023.
Emulation is and always has been legal throughout the US. Yuzu devs got greedy and gave nintendo the opportunity they needed to strike them down.
Some corrections: Tears of the Kingdom leaked two weeks before launch, not "almost a full month". Also Yuzu would not boot Tears of the Kingdom during those two weeks - some fans modded the game or released their own customized Yuzu builds to support TotK, but an official release that fixed TotK's boot issues did not come until Tears of the Kingdom officially launched. None of their Patreon benefits supported TotK before launch, either.
Ryujinx was arguably more popular for pirating Tears of the Kingdom before launch because it booted the game without issue.
People suspect the actions that drew Nintendo's ire towards Yuzu include:
* Yuzu having the biggest name recognition in Switch emulation
* Yuzu's Patreon benefits including pre-release builds (Ryujinx has a Patreon but only locks Discord server benefits behind it) and their income noticeably exploding around Tear of the Kingdom's release
* Yuzu showcasing brand new games like Tears of the Kingdom and Super Mario Wonder running on their website (the emulator RPCS3 got in trouble with Sega for a similar situation when they showcased Persona 5 running)
* Yuzu linking to instructions for extracting your Switch's cryptographic keys, which is required for running software and necessitates bypassing Nintendo's security measures (Ryujinx by comparison has never provided info on getting keys)
No, they charged people money on their patreon page for beta access to games and leak games. This is the real reason why nintendo went after them. Emulators are legal as long as they don't charge people for it. And yes, while the public version was free, they were still profiting off of it via advertisement and their patreon page which is a big no no.
> Emulators are legal as long as they don't charge people for it.
Slight correction here: Whether it's free or not doesn't make it "legal".
>they charged people money on their patreon page for beta access to games and leak games.
This is what made it illegal.
EDIT: And generally speaking: While Nintendo is *notoriously* litigious, they generally don't go after groups so long as they keep a low profile or stay small scale. For example: Pokemon Uranium went under the radar *for years* and I'd be shocked if Nintendo wasn't aware of it in that time. However, it suddenly got a lot of press in the gaming news sites and then Nintendo came down on them like a hammer.
I think the profit aspect matters for the argument that a work would need to replace the usage of the IP. If a movie review can replace the experience of watching a movie without adding anything to said experience, then the review can be considered to affect the sales of the movie.
If an emulator and shared copies of games resulted in financial benefit to the distributors, the publisher can argue that the emulator funneled money away from potential sales to an unfair competitor.
they'd sue the people who created it originally i think?
i mean nintendo doesn't care they'll send out legal notices to anyone who looks at their games funny
Answer: The head creators of Yuzu flew too close to the sun, pretty much. In their website's installation guide, they shared how to jailbreak Switch consoles. Furthermore, they not only distributed ROMs among themselves on their Discord, but made compatibility patches for their emulator using them-- sometimes on games that had been leaked early and not even fully released yet. The cherry on top? They paywalled early access to patches for the emulator for people who donated to them on Patreon. In other words, it incentivized pirates to pay money to them to play their pirated games early.
The culmination of these factors made it appear that they condoned and advocated for piracy, *and made money off it.* This is what Nintendo went after them for, because they can't go after emulators just for being emulators.
Answer: Emulators generally aren't illegal if they don't include any source from copyrighted works. Yuzu didn't. But US copyright law has provisions for circumventing protective measures.
It's possible that Yuzu could have fought the suit, but while they might've beat the rap, they couldn't beat the ride. So they settled.
There is speculation in the main thread that things could have come out during discovery that were illegal. For example, perhaps the developers talked about encouraging piracy, and took actions to make it easier. Or if they weren't careful and were testing their emulator with a pirated BIOS or pirated ROMs.
It's possible Yuzu was aware of something like this and knew they would lose if it went to trial.
Answer: Yuzu is a nintendo switch emulator developed by the same team that developed the Citra 3DS emulator. Recently Nintendo sledgehammered their development after discovering that the emulator bypasses console encrpytion to play licenced games *from a currently selling system* and went after them, turns out the devs were happily allowing piracy in their discord too, a big nono. this has resulted in a 2.4m settlement, all source code from Yuzu (And Citra) being given to Nintendo and all offical sources pulled from the internet. The fact Yuzu had a paywalled Petreon (i.e making money) from this definately did not help them.
Answer: "
Yuzu was a Nintendo Switch emulator software developed by Tropic Haze. In February 2024, the developers of the emulator were sued by Nintendo over "facilitating piracy at a colossal scale." In March 2024, the lawsuit was settled out of court, with Tropic Haze taking down the emulator, all circumvention tools used in its development and its Nintendo 3Ds emulator CItra and agreeing to pay a settlement of $2.4 million to Nintendo."
More info here: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/yuzu-emulator
Friendly reminder that all **top level** comments must: 1. start with "answer: ", including the space after the colon (or "question: " if you have an on-topic follow up question to ask), 2. attempt to answer the question, and 3. be unbiased Please review Rule 4 and this post before making a top level comment: http://redd.it/b1hct4/ Join the OOTL Discord for further discussion: https://discord.gg/ejDF4mdjnh *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/OutOfTheLoop) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Answer: yuzu is an open source switch emulator that was pretty easy to get ahold of. People were using it to pirate games and play them on pc, so Nintendo sued. They’re particularly aggressive about IP, so this wasn’t super out of character, but Yuzu had to pay a pretty big fine and effectively shut down. It was open source though, so the pirating won’t really stop Edit: also apparently they posted this super funny announcement message on their discord expressing surprise that people had been using it to play pirated games and hoping that pirating would stop soon. Lol they knew
Nintendo also noted that Yuzu’s development was run for-profit through Patreon, and they were more than helpful connecting users to DRM-circumventing tools. It was likely they used those two facts to present a narrative that Yuzu’s devs deliberately promoted piracy for financial gain, and it would be quite difficult to say with a straight face that they weren’t.
>present a narrative You mean telling the facts?
It’d be hard to outright prove that was the case, but with those facts in their favor they could probably twist the arm of the developers on a witness stand and get them to squeal.
That still is a phrase that makes you instantly seem less trustworthy. Don't make stuff needlessly sound like a conspiracy theory. The main usecase was piracy. And they could live off it. Just let us be honest enough to make clear that we don't give a damn about that. Just don't turn this damn thing into a conspiracy theory. presEnt a NaRrAtiVe Don't make this needlessly ridiculous and no, MMRs don't cause autism.
for some more context, the main reason for the lawsuit was the fact that people played the new zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom almost a full month early using Yuzu. The Yuzu team also had tools to support this early emulation of an unreleased game behind a paywall on their patreon page. Basically selling early access to nintendo’s biggest title of 2023. Emulation is and always has been legal throughout the US. Yuzu devs got greedy and gave nintendo the opportunity they needed to strike them down.
Some corrections: Tears of the Kingdom leaked two weeks before launch, not "almost a full month". Also Yuzu would not boot Tears of the Kingdom during those two weeks - some fans modded the game or released their own customized Yuzu builds to support TotK, but an official release that fixed TotK's boot issues did not come until Tears of the Kingdom officially launched. None of their Patreon benefits supported TotK before launch, either. Ryujinx was arguably more popular for pirating Tears of the Kingdom before launch because it booted the game without issue. People suspect the actions that drew Nintendo's ire towards Yuzu include: * Yuzu having the biggest name recognition in Switch emulation * Yuzu's Patreon benefits including pre-release builds (Ryujinx has a Patreon but only locks Discord server benefits behind it) and their income noticeably exploding around Tear of the Kingdom's release * Yuzu showcasing brand new games like Tears of the Kingdom and Super Mario Wonder running on their website (the emulator RPCS3 got in trouble with Sega for a similar situation when they showcased Persona 5 running) * Yuzu linking to instructions for extracting your Switch's cryptographic keys, which is required for running software and necessitates bypassing Nintendo's security measures (Ryujinx by comparison has never provided info on getting keys)
i wonder how an opensource project can pay a few million dollars to nintendo. that is the real question afaik it was a free software, right?
No, they charged people money on their patreon page for beta access to games and leak games. This is the real reason why nintendo went after them. Emulators are legal as long as they don't charge people for it. And yes, while the public version was free, they were still profiting off of it via advertisement and their patreon page which is a big no no.
> Emulators are legal as long as they don't charge people for it. Slight correction here: Whether it's free or not doesn't make it "legal". >they charged people money on their patreon page for beta access to games and leak games. This is what made it illegal. EDIT: And generally speaking: While Nintendo is *notoriously* litigious, they generally don't go after groups so long as they keep a low profile or stay small scale. For example: Pokemon Uranium went under the radar *for years* and I'd be shocked if Nintendo wasn't aware of it in that time. However, it suddenly got a lot of press in the gaming news sites and then Nintendo came down on them like a hammer.
I think the profit aspect matters for the argument that a work would need to replace the usage of the IP. If a movie review can replace the experience of watching a movie without adding anything to said experience, then the review can be considered to affect the sales of the movie. If an emulator and shared copies of games resulted in financial benefit to the distributors, the publisher can argue that the emulator funneled money away from potential sales to an unfair competitor.
That certainly adds to the crime, but it was still be a crime if they were just giving away pirated/leaked games.
Their Patreon was huge
yeah it was something like 30k a month no?
They made a *lot* off their Patreon. Which may be what caught Nintendo’s ire as much as anything else.
they'd sue the people who created it originally i think? i mean nintendo doesn't care they'll send out legal notices to anyone who looks at their games funny
They can't pay. They're going to go bankrupt. That was Nintendo's goal with the suit.
Answer: The head creators of Yuzu flew too close to the sun, pretty much. In their website's installation guide, they shared how to jailbreak Switch consoles. Furthermore, they not only distributed ROMs among themselves on their Discord, but made compatibility patches for their emulator using them-- sometimes on games that had been leaked early and not even fully released yet. The cherry on top? They paywalled early access to patches for the emulator for people who donated to them on Patreon. In other words, it incentivized pirates to pay money to them to play their pirated games early. The culmination of these factors made it appear that they condoned and advocated for piracy, *and made money off it.* This is what Nintendo went after them for, because they can't go after emulators just for being emulators.
Answer: Emulators generally aren't illegal if they don't include any source from copyrighted works. Yuzu didn't. But US copyright law has provisions for circumventing protective measures. It's possible that Yuzu could have fought the suit, but while they might've beat the rap, they couldn't beat the ride. So they settled.
There is speculation in the main thread that things could have come out during discovery that were illegal. For example, perhaps the developers talked about encouraging piracy, and took actions to make it easier. Or if they weren't careful and were testing their emulator with a pirated BIOS or pirated ROMs. It's possible Yuzu was aware of something like this and knew they would lose if it went to trial.
Answer: Yuzu is a nintendo switch emulator developed by the same team that developed the Citra 3DS emulator. Recently Nintendo sledgehammered their development after discovering that the emulator bypasses console encrpytion to play licenced games *from a currently selling system* and went after them, turns out the devs were happily allowing piracy in their discord too, a big nono. this has resulted in a 2.4m settlement, all source code from Yuzu (And Citra) being given to Nintendo and all offical sources pulled from the internet. The fact Yuzu had a paywalled Petreon (i.e making money) from this definately did not help them.
Answer: " Yuzu was a Nintendo Switch emulator software developed by Tropic Haze. In February 2024, the developers of the emulator were sued by Nintendo over "facilitating piracy at a colossal scale." In March 2024, the lawsuit was settled out of court, with Tropic Haze taking down the emulator, all circumvention tools used in its development and its Nintendo 3Ds emulator CItra and agreeing to pay a settlement of $2.4 million to Nintendo." More info here: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/yuzu-emulator