Yuzu And Citra Emulators Shut Down After Legal Pressure From Nintendo

In a move that came as a surprise to many, the company behind popular Switch and 3DS emulators Yuzu and Citra – Tropic Haze LLC – as reported PC gamer shut down both projects and associated websites in a $2.4 million deal with Nintendo with a final message left on Yuzu’s website. This follows Nintendo’s lawsuit against Tropic Haze LLC over the Yuzu emulator, claiming there is “no legal way to use Yuzu” because it requires files ripped from a real Switch device to decrypt game files. Although Citra is not part of the lawsuit, it being filed by the same developers appears to have resulted in its removal along with Yuzu as collateral damage.

What makes this issue so legally tricky is that even though an emulator itself is not illegal, requiring proprietary firmware and keys already takes us into contested territory over the legality of dumping these files from a console, even if you own them. This was already a problem with early Playstation emulators, which even required the Playstation BIOS image to boot, but left emulator developers mostly untouchable. What seems to have set off Nintendo’s lawyers here appears to be the way Yuzu’s developers leaned into the copyright infringement (often erroneously called “piracy”) angle, giving the legal team from Nintendo enough exposed flesh to launch a legal ballistic strike.

What will be the consequences of this whole affair? Clearly, Yuzu and Citra are gone, if only in name. As open source projects, Citra is likely to reappear under a different name, while Yuzu may also be reincarnated, although very likely. Despite decades of lawsuits from Nintendo and others, the emulators themselves are legal, even under the blatant US DMCA, and the dumping of firmware and game ROMs from the systems and media you purchased can be done with impunity, although that leaves Nintendo et al. thundering at the mouth.

In fact, what this lawsuit and settlement tell us is that even though emulators are widely used to violate copyright, emulator developers should only reluctantly admit it, lamenting the depravity of humanity that these unscrupulous individuals would do such a horrible thing, rather than admit it. just buy more games and change them format for saving and personal emulator use.