In a move that will come as a surprise to many, popular Switch and 3DS emulators Yuzu and Citra – the company behind Tropic Haze LLC – have announced. PC Gamer there is turn off both projects and released a final message on related websites as part of a $2.4 million settlement with Nintendo Yuzu site. It comes after Nintendo to sue Tropic Haze LLC claims on the Yuzu emulator that there is “no legal way to use Yuzu” and requires files extracted from a real Switch device to decrypt game files. Although not the Citra part claimher being made by the same developers seems to have resulted in her being axed as collateral damage along with Yuzu.
What makes this a legal issue is that while the emulator itself isn’t illegal, the person asking for the custom software and keys is entering contested territory regarding the legality of dumping said files from a console, even if you already have them. This was already a problem with the first Playstation emulators, which required the Playstation BIOS image to even be loaded, but left the emulator developers largely untouched. What’s tripping up Nintendo’s lawyers here seems to be that the Yuzu developers are leaning into the copyright infringement (often mistakenly called “piracy”) angle, giving Nintendo’s legal team enough exposed meat to launch a ballistic legal strike.
What will be the result of all this work? Obviously, Yuzu and Citra are gone, not just in name. As open source projects, Citra will reappear under a different name, while Yuzu will likely reincarnate itself. Despite decades of litigation by Nintendo and others, emulators themselves are legal even under the dreaded US DMCA, and dumping software and game ROMs from the systems and media you buy can go unpunished, even if they come from Nintendo and others. fog in the mouth.
Effectively, this lawsuit and settlement tells us that even if emulators are widely used for copyright infringement, emulator developers should begrudgingly admit it and lament the depravity of humanity instead of these unscrupulous individuals doing such a terrible thing. just buy more games and format them for backup and personal emulator use.
