Just last week, on Tuesday, February 26th, 2024, news broke out about the Yuzu emulator team being sued by none other than Nintendo themselves, with Nintendo claiming that the emulator apparently allowed users to play certain games early (due to street dates being broken) and also allowing piracy of the current Nintendo Switch system.

Today, in a rather surprisingly quick manner, it seems like Tropic Haze LLC., the company behind the Yuzu team, has reached a settlement with Nintendo in regards to the lawsuit. According to a recent official document uploaded just a few minutes ago, Tropic Haze will pay up 2.4 million USD in favour to Nintendo, with both parties agreeing in the settlement and its amount.

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UPDATE: According to the proposed Final Judgement and Permanent Injunction document, Yuzu as a whole in its current form will cease to exist, meaning no further development and prohibition of any distribution of built or source code forms of it.

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Official document of the settlement
Final Judgement and Permanent Injunction

 

[DonCaballero]

Yuzu team deserves what's coming for them to be honest , they didn't come prepared to that lawsuit and didn't even bring a good lawyer to back them up and put Nintnedo in their place , they just run with all the patreon money and now they wanna act "fight piracy at all costs" and dip like pussies erasing every trace behind them and sucking up to Nintendo dominance
Huge respect to Ryu team for not locking their builds behind a paywall and playing it safe

Bro they have to pay over 2 million dollars, how much money do you think they made on Patreon LMAO

 

[ertaboy356b]

I can't believe the lead dev assumed people wouldn't pirate using emulators.
That's unreal.

That's just lawyer speak IMO. if they didn't, they wouldn't have put a way to use prod.keys and decrypt roms on the fly. If they argue that it's for homebrew development only, they wouldn't need any keys to begin with. The big issue here is encrypted roms. There is a way to do this legally and that is to only read decrypted roms. That way, the emulator won't need any sort of key to decrypt because it is already decrypted.

 

[Izual Urashima]

Hope you guys actually stick by this and won't go drooling and going crazy over their next release.

Haven't bought anything Nintendo-related since the Switch's release, so I'm sticking to it thus far.

 

[ertaboy356b]

For what it's worth, I hope the community learn from this. I think what they should do is to offer options for decrypted roms (or a format for decrypted roms) much like how the Wii U community does it (.wua format).

 

[_47iscool]

Did they really post that? If so, I guess from now on all of their games will source-ported instead of emulated, right?

(found this using an image search)

 

[Foxi4]

Did they really post that? If so, I guess from now on all of their games will source-ported instead of emulated, right?

(found this using an image search)
View attachment 423930

They haven’t, and you could’ve easily found that out yourself if you just went on Twitter to check. @Nintendo is the handle for the Japanese branch of the company, they don’t tweet in English and this tweet doesn’t exist.

 

[AkiraKurusu]

This sucks, especially on the Citra end, but...at least we still have Ryujinx, for the Switch.

Unlike Citra - I haven't personally heard of any other 3DS emulators, especially ones rivalling the now-shrivelled lemon (or is it an orange?) in terms of compatibility and quality.

 

[MasterJ360]

Nintendo got their free money, but the internet will keep both emulators alive. Someone can just work on them anonymously for future games. Meanwhile Ryujinx is doing great. They also updated their UI recently which looks better.

 

[Bladexdsl]

but...at least we still have Ryujinx, for the Switch.

for now....

 

[Jaxom]

Feels like the US isn't a good place if you want to do stuff that is gray zone

Every time I read about those kinds of news, that's exactly my thought.
Japan's and USA's companies are quite prone to sue people wanting to exploit their belongings how they see fit.

 

[MasterJ360]

Every time I read about those kinds of news, that's exactly my thought.
Japan's and USA's companies are quite prone to sue people wanting to exploit their belongings how they see fit.

Its just Nintendo that we keep hearing mostly- They only see Red & White if anything that touches their IP.

 

[Jaxom]

Its just Nintendo that we keep hearing mostly- They only see Red & White if anything that touches their IP.

I heard a little about a case with Tesla: https://electrek.co/2020/08/22/tesla-fights-back-against-owners-hacking-unlock-performance-boost/ (edit: not about Tesla banning users, for this one, but the core is the same, there have been multiple reports of them banning customers who unlocked their car's potential by themselves, if you don't want users to use your products to the full extent, avoid putting software-crippled hardware ).

And I'm pretty sure it's more widespread than just those two companies (but considering we're on a video game-oriented website, that's logic that Nintendo is the one coming back in its columns).

 

[Pokemonfan6498]

Did you not see that you can use the same certificate on every game you have on the MIGSWITCH??? Meaning you only need one certificate i'm not joking and there's a full tutorial and video tutorial yup!!! You only need any one certificate and the initial data bin for that game which is all over the net and it works!!! Only 1 of the 5 files on the cart with the XCI paired with the certificate of any game are needed this is way worse than what yuzu was but wait it's okay because its on Nintendo's Hardware using the MIGSWITCH CART THEY MADE to sell us a system

Ok but still you know that every certificate is unique to each cart there's no way Nintendo will just not notice it

 

[AkiraKurusu]

for now....

Don't (Ryu)jinx us, plz. We still have Ryujinx for Switch emulation - we don't have anything for 3DS now.

 

[Pokemonfan6498]

Damn, Pokefan really going after Ryujinx for having the game work like it does on real hardware

I don't understand. It's our fault if people are paying Yuzu for early access builds ? It basically was a paid emulator, that's the issue. Not piracy.


I'd wait to see if they're coming for Ryujinx to really know if we truly have a target on our back. For now I don't think we have anything to really confirm that it wasn't just Yuzu that got too reckless with the amount of money they had thanks to their business model.

I see a lot of people claiming that people who work on emulators should not take donations and I don't think « taking money » is an issue by itself, Yuzu just had too many.

Im serious last time when i tried to play Pokémon sword and shield i clearly saw a polygon grid on some models that's not how it's supposed to run even on real hardware

 

[yoyoyo69]

Is this act of aggression confirmation that the Switch 2 is literally a switch hacksawed in half, then each piece glued to another switch? (Sticking with the tradition these past couple decades)

 

[linuxares]

Remember kids. Discord logs everything! (found on reddit)

 

[Zumoly]

You know this was coming when PC users would taunt Switch owners that TOTK runs better on their PC than on real hardware...way before the game was officially released.

 

[Zowayix]

I'm surprised no one has specifically mentioned that Yuzu probably broke fair use.

Note: I am not a lawyer.

Really dumbed down:

• Nonprofit or transformative
  • Definitely qualified as commercial (paywalled early access builds). Transformative would be hard to argue over it.
• What is the nature of the original copyrighted work
  • Current flagship games
• How much copyrighted work was used in the final product
  • Zero (a lot of people seem to be focusing on this one point)
• How is the market value of the work affected
  • Definitely a strong argument that the market value was negatively affected

So Yuzu probably met 1 or 1.5 out of 4 points, which is not even close to enough (you usually need at least 3.5, sometimes 3 if all three are very strong).

By contrast, you could do much better with an old non-commercial emulator for a discontinued platform (nonprofit; obsolete game preservation; zero; little to no market to negatively affect).

 

[Bladexdsl]

Don't (Ryu)jinx us, plz. We still have Ryujinx for Switch emulation - we don't have anything for 3DS now.

whats stopping nintenSUE from going after them next than? they know they can get away with it now