Board 8 > Nintendo has officially murdered the Switch Emulator Yuzu and 3DS Emulator Citra

(+) Yeah! (+)

Hello yuz-ers and Citra fans:
We write today to inform you that yuzu and yuzus support of Citra are being discontinued, effective immediately.
yuzu and its team have always been against piracy. We started the projects in good faith, out of passion for Nintendo and its consoles and games, and were not intending to cause harm. But we see now that because our projects can circumvent Nintendos technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy. In particular, we have been deeply disappointed when users have used our software to leak game content prior to its release and ruin the experience for legitimate purchasers and fans.
We have come to the decision that we cannot continue to allow this to occur. Piracy was never our intention, and we believe that piracy of video games and on video game consoles should end. Effective today, we will be pulling our code repositories offline, discontinuing our Patreon accounts and Discord servers, and, soon, shutting down our websites. We hope our actions will be a small step toward ending piracy of all creators works.
Thank you for your years of support and for understanding our decision.

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/nintendo-3ds-emulator-citra-taken-offline-as-collateral-damage-in-yuzu-settlement/

pirate nintendo games

Didn't personally use Yuzu but I'm worried Ryujinx is next in the firing line if they can find a legal foothold. Have to imagine they want to go scorched earth right now since Switch 2 probably has largely similar architecture and Switch games are already being emulated at higher resolution/framerates up to a week before they even come out.

Citra is also a shitty loss but that was basically just collateral without any legit legal issues so I'm sure it'll be forked and continued under a different name before too long.

do i need to be rushing out to download these emulators now? I understand theyre open source and Ive never really gotten into nintendo emulation beyond the SNES/GBA but this really sucks.

yuzu's github is gone so the only way to it is through third party sites/torrents.
citra was still up earlier today and i got it but same rules will apply.

probably a good idea to get ryujinx if you want switch. personally i still think it's the paywall that fucked them. by limiting the product they essentially were selling the emulators and that, outside of app stores, has been a big nono. only a matter of time there and if they can ever get a workaround to the more proper legal issue of encrypted/decrypted keys.

These emulators need to stop flying so close to the sun. Don't make Patreons for illegal activities ffs. Didn't Dolphin also get in hot water for trying to get itself added to Steam?

Maybe next time pirates should shut up about these emulators and how they are playing all these Switch games on their Steam Decks and PCs. Emulation back in the day used to be hush hush. Now we got idiots showing off this shit on Tiktok and dumb fucks taking every chance they can get to brag about it on reddit.

GranzonEx posted...

Maybe next time pirates should shut up about these emulators and how they are playing all these Switch games on their Steam Decks and PCs. Emulation back in the day used to be hush hush. Now we got idiots showing off this shit on Tiktok and dumb fucks taking every chance they can get to brag about it on reddit.

Welcome to emulation post Casual Revolution.

boo nintendo

clearly they wanted more sales for unicorn overlord

UF8 posted...

clearly they wanted more sales for unicorn overlord

I bought unicorn physically for switch but with all this bullshit Im wondering if its time to make it my inaugural switch emulated game on my steam deck

I don't understand what Nintendo did wrong here

KamikazePotato posted...

Don't make Patreons for illegal activities ffs.

Yeah this. This is the crux of the issue.

MZero posted...

I don't understand what Nintendo did wrong here

Well for one thing the 3DS is a legacy device and there's no practical way for it to output to a monitor or record footage from it for most people

KamikazePotato posted...

Don't make Patreons for illegal activities ffs.

Emulation isn't illegal, though - this isn't a grey area at all, it's a settled matter.

Yuzu did unquestionably fuck up though by using illegally obtained materials to fuel their early access fork (stuff like TotK optimizations more than a week before the game launched), so they were directly making money off of what's essentially theft, which is the main area they opened themselves up legally here.

paperwarior posted...

Well for one thing the 3DS is a legacy device and there's no practical way for it to output to a monitor or record footage from it for most people

I don't think Nintendo was really aiming for Citra. It was just collateral damage since it's being maintained by the same people behind Yuzu.

mnk posted...

I don't think Nintendo was really aiming for Citra. It was just collateral damage since it's being maintained by the same people behind Yuzu.

Yeah, probably, but like with Yuzu itself, the users will suffer for it.

MZero posted...

I don't understand what Nintendo did wrong here

Nothing. Yuzu fucked up. But still sucks for the users!

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

Piracy was never our intention, and we believe that piracy of video games and on video game consoles should end.

Is this a joke? Or are they just trying to look good and there's legal trouble going on behind the scenes?

Waluigi1 posted...

Is this a joke? Or are they just trying to look good and there's legal trouble going on behind the scenes?

It's probably something that they were obligated to say as part of the settlement with Nintendo tbh

Xiahou_Shake posted...

Emulation isn't illegal, though - this isn't a grey area at all, it's a settled matter.

Not really. The precedent on emulation is extremely narrow, and likely wouldn't apply in a case like this.

Waluigi1 posted...

Is this a joke? Or are they just trying to look good and there's legal trouble going on behind the scenes?

they cant exactly say we wanted to do piracy and we love it! Obviously thats true, but they have to at least pretend that they dont want to facilitate something illegal.

MacArrowny posted...

Not really. The precedent on emulation is extremely narrow, and likely wouldn't apply in a case like this.

You're right on both parts, in fairness - it definitely wouldn't apply here because as we mentioned, Yuzu fucked up pretty bad on how their paywalled version was handled and updated. The narrow precedent basically just means you have to maintain plausible deniability on anything you're doing with them, though that obviously wasn't possible when they were doing game-specific updates on a game that was more than a week from release. Generally speaking though most emulators manage to float in that narrow realm of legality, though cynically that still doesn't stop a company like Nintendo from just throwing lawyers at anyone they don't like until the group is forced to shut down, regardless of the validity of their claims.

Xiahou_Shake posted...

though cynically that still doesn't stop a company like Nintendo from just throwing lawyers at anyone they don't like until the group is forced to shut down, regardless of the validity of their claims.

In practice though Nintendo really only goes after the most egregious cases.

Most other emulators are also focused on machines that have been abandoned by their companies. The Switch is just unfortunate enough to be based on an Nvidia chip that has a lot of documentation so it was incredibly easy to either jailbreak and or reverse engineer for emulation. This lawsuit all but confirms the Switch 2 is going to be very similar to the Switch. I expect emulators will have Switch 2 games running without much problem.

Yeah, pretty much all the cases against emulation have been when there's an active platform involved, since the theoretical loss is greater that way. That's why the question is whether they go after RyujinX, the other major Switch emulator, next.

Got'em

Yeah um, I know it's hip and cool to say "boo Nintendo" but this is, for once, kinda a situation where Nintendo hasn't really done anything wrong. Yuzu goofed hard and repeatedly. They put themselves in this situation.

Fuck Nintendo. As long as they don't have a way to let players play their old games, fuck them. Emulators are godsend for this reason only

Don't laugh, but I was in a real state of depression when the 3DS eshop shutdown.
Ever since the shutdown was announced, I knew that evantaully I would need to make a in-depth research what games I want to buy.
And I held it off until the very last month. Then it was a race against time. Looking at recommendtion lists, reviews, youtube vidoes, trying to compile a list of games that I want and don't own yet.
Then crossing off games that I can get on other platforms.
It took a long time but evantually I made the list. It totalled to $2700 worth of games that I "somewhat want"
Which is absurd
So I trimmed it a little more....and it was still around $1000
Around $1000 of games that I might never play but want to purchase just in case that someday I will want to play them

Because fuck FOMO

At the end I decided to check how each game runs on Citra, realized that most of them run fine and those that don't I am not willing to pay full price for (look I am curious about Federation Force and Sticker Star but no way in hell I am going to pay $40 for each) and only Bravely Second had some problems so that was the only game I bought

All of this story just to say -
Fuck Nintendo, preserve your games

Its an unfortunate outcome (especially for Citra) as emulation has an important role in preservation. However theres no denying Yuzu flew way too close to the sun on this one.

Fair, next.

According to Graphtreon, they had almost 8k paying members and were making 30k per month. This looks more like a "take the money and run before we get in deeper shit" type of situation.

I also saw in the legal filings that Nintendo pointed out that Yuzu's telemetry feature would send them back data on who was playing what (and other metadata) and expected that if they reached discovery they expected to be able to use that to show that Yuzu was well aware that games were being pirated/played before release date so maybe they figured that if it reached discovery they might be in even more peril and so chose to just settle now before any penalty might be higher?

Not that such an argument would be ironclad by Nintendo, I don't know how they could conclusively prove that - for example - a ToTK played before the launch date was pirated and not simply a vendor mistakenly breaking street date and so a hypothetical player playing such a copy would be doing nothing wrong.

eh

another emulator will come along shortly

Thorn posted...

I also saw in the legal filings that Nintendo pointed out that Yuzu's telemetry feature would send them back data on who was playing what (and other metadata) and expected that if they reached discovery they expected to be able to use that to show that Yuzu was well aware that games were being pirated/played before release date so maybe they figured that if it reached discovery they might be in even more peril and so chose to just settle now before any penalty might be higher?

Not that such an argument would be ironclad by Nintendo, I don't know how they could conclusively prove that - for example - a ToTK played before the launch date was pirated and not simply a vendor mistakenly breaking street date and so a hypothetical player playing such a copy would be doing nothing wrong.

Pretty sure they also had guides on how to extract decryption keys etc in their discord. Rookie mistake.

Old emulators just tell you to google that stuff.

The idea of emulators for current gen is really strange to me - I would 100% expect that to be shut down

Emulators are for being able to play older stuff that's tough to get - should keep it that way. I don't see why anybody would be up in arms about this Yuzu thing. The 3DS thing sucks but... that's not shield to protect a Switch emulator.

GranzonEx posted...

Pretty sure they also had guides on how to extract decryption keys etc in their discord. Rookie mistake.

they linked to those tools directly on their website

KommunistKoala posted...

they linked to those tools directly on their website

That's beyond stupid LOL

If it weren't for the TOTK leak they would still be alive. Which is pretty amazing considering how blatant they were being.

Omniscientless posted...

According to Graphtreon, they had almost 8k paying members and were making 30k per month. This looks more like a "take the money and run before we get in deeper shit" type of situation.

Take what money? After their 2.4 million dollar payment, that 30k a month isnt looking like much

I thought the 2.4 million was derived by multiplying the 30k per month, by the number of months they were in service. At least, I think I read that somewhere. But I doubt they were making 30k the whole time.

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

Take what money? After their 2.4 million dollar payment, that 30k a month isnt looking like much

It's an LLC, they're going to declare bankruptcy and not actually pay that 2.4 million. That's why they made it in the first place, to not end up personally liable like Gary Bowser.

https://www.tumblr.com/butchlinkle/744144245139685376/one-thing-i-keep-seeing-people-say-irt-yuzu-is

a good post regarding the legality of paid emulators, and other issues

ivysnow posted...

https://www.tumblr.com/butchlinkle/744144245139685376/one-thing-i-keep-seeing-people-say-irt-yuzu-is

a good post regarding the legality of paid emulators, and other issues

"3. Tropical Haze has always been staunchly antipiracy"

a very stupid post, more like

ivysnow posted...

https://www.tumblr.com/butchlinkle/744144245139685376/one-thing-i-keep-seeing-people-say-irt-yuzu-is

a good post regarding the legality of paid emulators, and other issues

This isn't a good post at all lol.

that part is definitely debatable but there are still good points made. ultimately, stomping piracy is consumer unfriendly and doesn't actually produce tangible benefits for nintendo besides maybe an extra slide at a shareholder meeting. people who engage in media piracy are, generally, prolific legal consumers of media as well. generating enmity for no real reason is just bad business.

if you want to give tropical haze shit for poor management of their public face, i think there's something to be said for that. but ultimately nintendo doesn't deserve any kind of leeway here.

Nanis23 posted...

Fuck Nintendo. As long as they don't have a way to let players play their old games, fuck them. Emulators are godsend for this reason only

Don't laugh, but I was in a real state of depression when the 3DS eshop shutdown.
Ever since the shutdown was announced, I knew that evantaully I would need to make a in-depth research what games I want to buy.
And I held it off until the very last month. Then it was a race against time. Looking at recommendtion lists, reviews, youtube vidoes, trying to compile a list of games that I want and don't own yet.
Then crossing off games that I can get on other platforms.
It took a long time but evantually I made the list. It totalled to $2700 worth of games that I "somewhat want"
Which is absurd
So I trimmed it a little more....and it was still around $1000
Around $1000 of games that I might never play but want to purchase just in case that someday I will want to play them

Because fuck FOMO

At the end I decided to check how each game runs on Citra, realized that most of them run fine and those that don't I am not willing to pay full price for (look I am curious about Federation Force and Sticker Star but no way in hell I am going to pay $40 for each) and only Bravely Second had some problems so that was the only game I bought

All of this story just to say -
Fuck Nintendo, preserve your games

Also funny thing-
There were plenty of games that never saw a eshop release or were removed from it at some point.

Like, want Cave Story 3D? Tough luck, must buy a physical copy for $300

Accel_R8 posted...

Yeah um, I know it's hip and cool to say "boo Nintendo" but this is, for once, kinda a situation where Nintendo hasn't really done anything wrong. Yuzu goofed hard and repeatedly. They put themselves in this situation.

Definitely the opposite tbh, usually "fuck Nintendo" is about something stupid but it's kinda warranted here

To my understanding, the part people are ignoring when comparing Yuzu to Bleem is that Yuzu wasn't try to charge for an emulator. They were pay walling functionality specifically for playing TotK behind their Patreon. To the point other people patched it on their own instantly because it was simply carved out.

Also, my understanding in regards to Bleem is that they won injunctions, not that any actual lawsuits were ever seen to completion or that any precedent was ever set.