Yuzu emulator shutting down, paying Nintendo 2.4 million in lawsuit settlement

The list of reasons why I refuse to buy Nintendo products is getting pretty hefty at this point.
- Tbh in a third world country, Nintendo is a very big luxury. I never imagined buying one at any point in my life. I will buy a steamdeck as soon as it launches in my country.
- What else?
  
  Well there's the fact that they're selling switch release titles for full price 7 years later

Yuzu fucked up. This is about more than the decryption. Yuzu's actions (copypasta from a fine redditor):
Massive patreon, to the point it has an LLC set to manage the money flow
Early access releases are effectively SOLD, they fucked around with manifest/build files, abused GPL to go after some forks back when they were Citra, attacked other forks/emulators then benefitted from their work and even replicated their practices (like CEMU's patreon), etc
Actively targets Switch competitors (Steam Deck, Android), to the point Valve once included it in a marketing reel
Its presence on the OFFICIAL Android play store rather than an apk competes with Nintendo's own Android games (undermining both those and the Switch)
Unauthorized use of Nintendo imagery
Extensive telemetry, itself juicy data that could be sold for advertisers, on top of Nintendo's own built-in telemetry that's also sent
Patreon marketing is heavily focused on games that broke street day release date, and even when they show some "restraint" it's just a release day post how much better the game runs on a platform that's not the Nintendo Switch, in the same launch period where most sales happen
Progress reports timed suspiciously close to major Nintendo first-party releases
ATTEMPTED to make a competitor to the Switch Online service, using files from an external preservation group, and it would have been a PAID service, and the subscription MORE EXPENSIVE than Nintendo's actual service (it was $60 something) despite smaller compatibility, for games still online, as a CLOSED-SOURCE FORK of a GPL PROJECT so that players don't actually set up their own custom servers to avoid paying Yuzu's pittance. When there was backlash, they REMOVED all traces of online emulation after they couldn't profit off it.
- Yeah their problem was to make it a commercial operation. At that point it's trivial for Nintendo to show they've enriched themselves on the back of ripped ROMs by enabling them.
  Whereas if you do everything for free and don't even accept donations, they'd have a big problem showing that you have any commercial interest and hence can be sued for damages.
  
  Reverse engineering software (and even using small bits of proprietary code when required) in order to make it compatible with other hardware is fully legal (tons of precedent, for emulation specifically see Sega v Accolade and Sony v Connectix), and selling emulators commercially is also fully legal (Sega v Connectix was about a commercial Playstation emulator for the Mac, Sony v Bleem was about a commercial emulator for the PC and Dreamcast)
  Nintendo's legal claims against Yuzu are completely untested and dubious at best, it's the threat of spending millions of dollars on lawyers that's very real and effective, they are yet again simply weaponizing the courts and the DMCA like all the other corpo scum before them
  
  The problem is that this shit is a lot of work that we all benefit from... So how do we compensate the devs?
- It's really just that they profited from it.
  If it was more than just that, they would have, or will in the near future, go after Ryujinx or the many incoming forks of Yuzu.
- Very few of those are legally problematic, pretty much just the imagery, possibly GPL issues (but Nintendo wouldn't have standing for those), and due to copyright weirdness 3rd party online services for games which still have active online services (it shouldn't be, but that's how it's been interpreted)
  Not enough for Nintendo to be able to force the project to stop, but they didn't want to fight it in court I assume
- Early access releases are effectively SOLD, they fucked around with manifest/build files, abused GPL to go after some forks back when they were Citra, attacked other forks/emulators then benefitted from their work and even replicated their practices (like CEMU’s patreon), etc
  Source on this?
  Also saying that EA was being sold is false, they were shipping precompiled binaries with the EA branches for the patrons, they were actually using the people that paid them for testing lol.
  If you used linux there was even an Aur package that built yuzu ea for you, which I quickly stopped using because EA was just the equivalent of the testing repo of archlinux, if you ever read their updates on their main discord, half the time the next EA release just removed a PR that broke something after release.
  Progress reports timed suspiciously close to major Nintendo first-party releases
  They only made progress reports once a month lol, and iirc the progress report for totk was several weeks after release even.
  Its presence on the OFFICIAL Android play store rather than an apk competes with Nintendo’s own Android games (undermining both those and the Switch)
  Nothing wrong here, even dolphin has a official apk on the playstore, and yuzu actually even released a non playstore apk for people like me with an ungoogled phone lol.
  Extensive telemetry, itself juicy data that could be sold for advertisers, on top of Nintendo’s own built-in telemetry that’s also sent
  Bullshit, their logs only contain info about the hardware, which is something you need to debug lol, Ryu logs are the same.
  ATTEMPTED to make a competitor to the Switch Online service, using files from an external preservation group, and it would have been a PAID service, and the subscription MORE EXPENSIVE than Nintendo’s actual service (it was $60 something) despite smaller compatibility, for games still online, as a CLOSED-SOURCE FORK of a GPL PROJECT so that players don’t actually set up their own custom servers to avoid paying Yuzu’s pittance. When there was backlash, they REMOVED all traces of online emulation after they couldn’t profit off it.
  I also want a source on this.

Oh, and it will surrender the yuzu-emu.org domain name to Nintendo, agree to delete not only its copies of Yuzu but also “all circumvention tools used for developing or using Yuzu—such as TegraRcmGUI, Hekate, Atmosphère, Lockpick_RCM, NDDumpTool, nxDumpFuse, and TegraExplorer,” and hand over any “physical circumvention devices” and “modified Nintendo hardware” to Nintendo. It also agrees to not delete any other “evidence” that infringes Nintendo’s IP rights.
Damn, I modded my Switch JUST in time! Thanks for giving me the motivation, Nintendo!
- The team behind Yuzu is different from ReSwitched and Atmosphere, so you were fine either way.
  This just means Yuzu agrees to delete their copies of the tools they used and send Nintendo their hacked Switch consoles (probably to be destroyed).
  
  Although the fact that these programs were named means that Nintendo's Eye of Sauron is on them - the extra attention makes me nervous. I definitely would have modded it this weekend if I hadn't already decided to last weekend.
- Wait Yuzu were behind all the other tools?? Surely that was other people?
  
  Pretty sure they're all by other people. Maybe they were hosting copies on their own server or something? Possibly they were just using them for Yuzu development.
- I did not.... 😭
  
  I imagine you'll still be able to do so for a while, if not forever. But probably worth doing it sooner rather than later if you're interested, just in case! Modding it has nothing to do with Yuzu, so I'm not sure why these other programs are involved.

Nintendo,
reinventing themselves as a law-suite company
which also publishes games on the side..
- They are becoming Oracle...
  
  They already are
  
  More like the Disney of video games.

Here ist the latest mainline Windows build: https://archive.org/details/yuzu-windows-msvc-20240227-120358cf6
- You, sir/madam, are amazing.
  
  Thx!! :) have a nice day!

In completely unrelated news, I now have a private repo on my private gitea that has a lot of c++ code
- In even more unrelated news, does anybody know of some good spots to bury random flash drives containing a lot of C++ code?
- I cloned main a few days ago but I heard a lot of tools got hit with this lawsuit so just main may not cut it.
  Also pro move Nintendo. I have a switch and some switch games And wouldn't have gone through using yuzu but now so many more people know it exists.
- Cool, how it's going with fixing current bugs? Switch 2 support is coming along nicely I assume?
  I jest, but Nintendo didn't expect the current version of the project to disappear. They just wanted to stop further development, which will over time make it less relevant, and most importantly won't be a problem for Switch 2 games.

Is yuzu really going to "shut down"? I have it installed on my computer at least. And it's foss, no? So anyone can clone the repo.
Damn, the repo is already gone.
- Here's my fork in case you want it: https://github.com/TxzK/yuzu. I'm sure some actively maintained forks will pop up eventually.
  
  Be careful, now Nintendo is out for blood. I would get it off GitHub at the very least.
  Take a look here for some potential alternatives: https://lemmy.world/post/12529718
  
  Hello, it's me Nintendo please pay me 2.4M bucks in damages from sharing those links, you vicious criminal 😭
  
  MVP!
  Fork the hell out of it guys,
  preserve the code and let things cool off.
  Then we eventually could see an active fork popping up.
  
  Saving this for when I get home. Ty!
  
  Lol, it's 21592 comments aheàd of roblabla/yuzu:master and 4.4k forks
  
  Thanks, cloned it to my homeserver
- Doesn’t matter if it’s gone, as long as it is available elsewhere, which of course it is.
  A fork will most certainly pop up. I’m curious what this means for ryujinx development going forward.
- They cannot truly shut down Yuzu, the open source project.
  They can - and did - shut down Yuzu, the commercial for-profit company.
- You can use the version you have already installed forever. Even reinstall over and over. Them shutting down won't stop it from working.
- It's gone from the Play Store as well. Glad I managed to grab a copy of the early access version few days ago even though my phone isn't fast enough to run it full speed. I guess the money I paid for the early access version went to Nintendo.
  
  Apkmirror has the APKs still
  
  I hope someone starts making an active fork while also providing a FDroid repository you can add.

If these guys were making money off their emulator then it's not surprising in the least that Nintendo gutted them.
Three trick to being a parasite is that you can't attract the hosts attention in any way. If you start eating the hosts food they goanna swat you.
- What kinda fucken bootlicky head-ass take is that?
  
  It's just how the world works mate. Call me names all you like but any company is going to sue you if you start making money off their IP.
  
  It's how legality in regards to something like emulators works. Emulation is not illegal, but profiteering from games being ripped and played without a legal license is. Which Yuzu did.
  
  I think it's pretty accurate. Nintendo is super protective of their IP and they don't like others profiting from it in any way.

I'm more than a little miffed that Nintendo has my Patreon dollars.
- Teaches you not to donate to commercial companies like Yuzu, they can run their own show. Or couldn't, I suppose. 😅

You wanna believe I downloaded it as soon as this was announced. Been playing some Metroid Dread on a 32 inch monitor with a controller that doesn't cramp up my hands the past couple of days. Thanks for giving me the push I needed Nintendo! I might have just been happy with my Steam library instead.
- Can you share the repo?
  
  A user named kadu was offering it up to all in the earlier thread. He said it'd be available as long as he was around. Just DM him for the link.

So, are Yuzu developers actually have $2.4M lying around, or will they pay for it in installment like Gary Bowser?
- they were making 30k/mo for a while, so for sure they can pay some of it off.
  
  Some people estimates they net ~$1.2M on patreon so far. If that's the case they still ~$1.2M short.
- The fact that they quickly agreed to this amount tells you all you need to know about how much money they - personally - made from the patreon.
  No wonder Nintendo got this so easily, unlike the other emulators they went after. With that kind of cash, good luck arguing in front of a judge that you're not running Yuzu as a commercial business.
  
  Yes it tells me all I need to know: that they don't care about the amount because they are going to declare bankruptcy anyway, since Yuzu is an LLC.

Good luck trying to "shut down" a open source software.. Still sucks tho, why Nintendo gotta make so good games but be so shitty of a company otherwise
- Unfortunately Nintendo will happily chase anyone that distributes this as aggressively as Metallica chased people around in the Napster days.
  Of course the tools will never be fully scoured.
  
  At least with Metallica, we could laugh at the irony of a band regularly releasing songs about anarchy crying about piracy.
  
  I've got a clone of it and am putting it up on IPFS

Here is the latest stable build of Yuzu that I've got from 24 hours ago for anyone who wasn't able to download it in time.
- Thank you, that's very considerate of you.

Is there any way to turn off Yuzu auto-update? I don't want my computer connecting to a website that Nintendo now owns every time I boot up Yuzu.
- Good point. I added yuzu-emu.org and all its subdomains to my custom blocklist in adguard for now. Alternatively you can put yuzu-emu.org, api.yuzu-emu.org and profile.yuzu-emu.org on your host file to block them.
- Assuming you're using Windows: https://www.howtogeek.com/784196/how-to-edit-the-hosts-file-on-windows-10-or-11/
  Point its domain at 127.0.0.1.
  You can do the same on Linux by editing /etc/hosts
- Edit the computer hosts file to resolve yuzu-emu.org to 0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.1? That will stop it from connecting, at least.

I got all the latest builds of Yuzu, which will I will soon upload to Mega, but it didn't occur to me to download the tools.

That's nuts.
- No, it's a citrus fruit.
  
  Uh...

Ok, so I’m not gonna buy anything from Nintendo anymore. Got it.
- You already didn't.
  Let's be real here, they weren't shut down for being an emulator, they were shut down for charging money and making bank, while also planning a parallel paid online service. All the other emulator projects are trucking along just fine, even if Nintendo hates some of them for decades by now.
  
  Exactly. Ryujinx is fine, so if you're already morally fine pirating you can - happily, I suppose - go ahead. Emulators for Nintendo stuff are a dime a dozen, and Nintendo isn't doing shit about them.
  Unless they make one for commercial purposes. See also: R4 cards.

Welp. I guess it's time to pirate double that in Nintendo IP.

Ryujinx is still around, also fuck Nintendo even thought I had bought all the games I play on Yuzu from here on out if I ever buy a Nintendo console it will be only if there is a method to pirate games on that shit. They don't deserve my money cause their hardware is shit it was 5 years outdated when the switch came out. I want to play my games at 60 FPS and without my eyes bleeding due to the shit resolution and anti-aliasing. So if they want my money they need to pull a Sony and release their games on pc!

I'm just sorry for them. 2.4M dollars? How will they ever pay this? Do you think they will actually have to pay it fully?
- They won't, they are an LLC. They can declare bankruptcy and close down the company. The actual people behind it are not responsible for paying, the company is.
- I vote they put up a GoFundMe. They deserve the world and Sintendo decided to throw their slimy tentacles all over them.
- If they went to trial they could have been blasted for way more. + Legal fees.
  It's a bummer, but don't feel sorry for them. It was clear violation, they knew they were on thin ice, or should have known.
  
  Violation of what?
  
  I wouldn't call it a clear violation of 17 U.S.C. 1201, but it was a plausible one. I do agree that they would have been blasted for legal fees trying to figure that part out, however.
  Nintendo had a leg to stand on, but it was highly dependent on whether the judge would find an emulator's primary purpose to be DRM prevention. A good judge that does research into the subject likely wouldn't find it to be the case, since the primary purpose is emulation and decrypting game titles is only a small part of that. Ending up with a luddite or corporate shill judge is always a huge risk, though.

Uh, the takedown was not caused by this mad lad reporting to nintendo, wasn't it?
- Definitely not. You'd have to be naive to think Nintendo wasn't aware of Yuzu since long, long, long before this.
  
  Seriously, especially with all of the early leaks. That person was so self-important they decided to try to get Nintendo to take Yuzu down; it makes sense that they would also think they were the ones that caused it when Nintendo finally took action.
  
  Exactly. People seem to think this is some short-term development, but you can bet that ever sinze Yuzu created it's LLC Nintendo was fully, 100%, planning on doing this, it was just the lawyers figuring out how to word things exactly so that it is completely bulletproof.
- What an absolute self absorbed scumbag...

I'm sure something else will eventually come along. The only way to stop emulators from existing is to not have a system at all. I.e., if Nintendo were to stop making video game hardware, then there would be no new emulators except for ones developed for previous/existing hardware.
- It probably will soon. They have a Patreon and also use prod.keys to decrypt games, and now Nintendo knows they can succeed on forcing settlements over this.
  
  Ryujinx devs are probably sweating right now. Might want to grab the latest version in case it goes away soon.
- Ryujinx still exists...though probably not for long.

That was fast.
Glad I haven't bought anything Nintendo since the Wii.
They could disappear for all I care.
- Personally never bought anything nintendo cause I'm on the younger side, and by the time switch came to my country it was already too old and expensive for me to even consider it.

Now that yuzu is gone they're going to be rolling in theoretical money.
- Of course it's selfish bullshit with these assholes... They could try to buy one of these programs, or hire the devs so maybe they could (checks notes) offer games to PC players that pirate them because we refuse to buy multiple hundred dollar consoles for one goddamn game.
  But why do that? You could just get a one time payment and then do it all again when the next emulator comes along... Assholes

I'm not sure how it'll work since I'm sure no one wants to be sued over a commit, but you pretty obviously can't kill an open source project so easily.
- Nintendo would need to prove that you had and ran the tools locally which is damn near impossible to do. I could create a commit without even opening the solution or compiling it.
  It would also put Nintendo up shit creek by turning the entire FOSS community against them.
  
  They kinda already did with this lawsuit. With this, no emulator is safe.
  
  No, they largely will go after people hosting and distributing the tools. Running it privately is obviously not legal, but wouldn't rise beyond Nintendo trying to ban you from stuff.

The GitHub repo (source code) for Yuzu now returns 404. It used to be here: https://github.com/yuzu-emu/yuzu
- Ok but where is the new repo? 😂
  
  https://lemmy.zip/comment/7971207
  This guy made a public archive.

Well, I think I now need to dowload this.
- You can't officially download it anymore. ~~If you're familiar with compiling things, there are backup forks everywhere, though.~~ A lovely Lemming posted an archive.org link to download the last builds in other comments here.

I'm really on the fence now on buying a console in the future. I've always bought the latest iteration and multiple games from Nintendo.
But they are turning into some lawyered slimy multi billion corporation feeding the orphan crushing machine.
If they don't operate with ethics, then neither should I.
- turning into
  Just FYI, Nintendo has always behaved this way. You can find stories about Nintendo suing and shutting down rom distributors for as long as roms have existed. They've also completely shut down several fan-made Pokémon games and tried going after rom hackers. They've also had a very long history of keeping their IPs completely exclusive to their platform and of reselling the same game on multiple platforms instead of allowing for backwards compatibility.
- Nintendo has ALWAYS aggressively pursued IP infringement, it's not out of greed but rather that if they don't, Japanese IP law means they might lose the exclusive rights.
  Anyone part of the oldschool emulation scene knows this. This isn't a new thing, and its not them being slimy.
- I just made this decision and ended up getting an EM780, it's a gaming APU PC that fits in the palm of your hand and uses an improved version of the chip in the steam deck.
  
  It's so cute!

That's wild. But I guess I'm not surprised since the emulator was really good and the system is still out there selling

It's not like they aren't making money off of their games
- Japan has some pretty convoluted IP laws, if Nintendo doesn't aggressively pursue ANY whiff of IP infringement, they might lose their exclusive rights. From what I hear this mainly has to do with bios and copy protection technology.
  So hypothetically, if it can be proven that Nintendo is aware of an infringer and does nothing, then they might lose their protections.
  
  Interesting, it's like they're back to the samurai Honor system lol