nintendo vs yuzu
We recently shared here on the blog the news about the lawsuit made by Nintendo against the developers of the popular Nintendo Switch emulator "Yuzu", in which Nintendo presented a large amount of collected information and detailed how Yuzu provided information to obtain the game decryption keys, to be able to execute them.
And now the Yuzu developers have given in and Tropic Haze LLC, representing the developers from the open source Yuzu emulator, I announce the agreement with Nintendo to abandon the litigation in exchange for the complete interruption of the development of the emulator, the closure of all resources associated with it and the payment of compensation in the amount of 2.4 million dollars.
Hello yuz-ers and Citra fans:
We are writing today to inform you that Yuzu and Yuzu's support of Citra will be discontinued with immediate effect.
Yuzu and her team have always been against piracy. We began the projects in good faith, out of passion for Nintendo and its consoles and games, and we had no intention of causing harm. But now we see that because our projects can bypass Nintendo's technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to widespread piracy...
We have come to the decision that we cannot continue to allow this to happen. Piracy was never our intention and we believe that piracy of video games and video game consoles should end.
Thank you for your years of support and for understanding our decision.
To prevent the release of pirated copies of games and protect against copying of games, Nintendo consoles use cryptographic keys to encrypt the contents of the firmware and game files. Nintendo owns or controls the copyrights to the games for its consoles and is responsible for licensing the distribution of games for its devices. The game's terms of use only allow play on your game console and prohibit the use of unauthorized devices.
According to Nintendo lawyers, the use of an emulator leads to illegal circumvention of methods of technical protection of access to content subject to copyright. To run the game on the Yuzu emulator, you must have keys to decrypt the game files. Although the recovery of keys to decrypt games falls on the users and is carried out using third-party tools, Nintendo perceives the mere act of decryption in the emulator as an illegal circumvention of technical protection measures. Even if a user uses keys taken from their own purchased copy, this violates the terms of use, which prohibit the creation of copies to run on other platforms.
It is worth mentioning that this move, in addition to affecting Yuzu, the cessation of development also affected Citra, the Nintendo 3DS emulator developed by the same development team.
Currently, content was removed from the Yuzu and Citra sites and a message to users was posted on the home page. Project repositories have also been removed from GitHub. In the near future, there are plans to close Discord servers, remove the Patreon page and transfer the rights of the domains to Nintendo. Community representatives have already attempted to create a Yuzu-Nuzu fork, but it is still unclear how Nintendo will react and whether its founders will be able to support the project at the appropriate level. Also still in operation is the Ryujinx project, which is developing another Nintendo Switch emulator.
In his speech to users, the Yuzu developers stated that they had no intention of causing harm with their activities and developed the project out of love for computer games and Nintendo game consoles. At the same time, they admit that the software they developed contributed to the development of game piracy for Nintendo, as it allowed them to bypass technical protection and play without using authorized equipment. The developers apologized to users, condemned the use of pirated copies of video games and expressed hope that their decision was a small step towards eradicating piracy.