The Yuzu and Citra emulators were discontinued after legal pressure from Nintendo

In a move that came as a surprise to many, the company behind the popular Switch and 3DS emulators Yuzu and Citra – Tropic Haze LLC – as reported by the website computer games he have close Both projects And associated sites as part of a $ 2.4 million settlement with Nintendo leaving a final message on Yuzu website. This comes on the heels of Nintendo prosecution Tropic Haze LLC via a Yuzu emulator, claiming that there is “no legal way to use Yuzu”, as it requires files extracted from a real Switch device to decrypt the game files. Although Citra is not part of lawsuitit appears to have been made by the same developers leading to him being left out with Yuzu as collateral damage.

What makes this issue legally thorny is that while the emulator itself is not illegal, requesting proprietary firmware and keys actually puts you in disputed territory over the legality of dumping said files from the console, even if you own them. This was already a problem with the first Playstation emulators, which required a Playstation BIOS image to even boot, but left emulator developers mostly untouched. What seemed to rile up Nintendo's lawyers here was the way the Yuzu developers leaned into the copyright infringement (often incorrectly called “piracy”) angle, giving Nintendo's legal team enough exposed flesh to launch a ballistic legal strike.

What will be the ramifications of this whole case? Yuzu and Sitra are clearly gone, if only in name. As open source projects, Citra will likely reappear under another name, while Yuzu could find herself reincarnated as well, albeit very likely. Despite lawsuits filed by Nintendo and others over the decades, emulators themselves are legal under the US's terrible DMCA, and game firmware and ROMs can be removed from systems and media you've purchased with impunity. Punishment, even if you leave Nintendo et al. Smoke in the mouth.

Effectively, what this lawsuit and settlement tells us is that even if emulators are widely used for copyright infringement, emulator developers should only regretfully admit it, and lament the depravity of humanity that such unscrupulous individuals would do such The terrible thing is, instead you just have to buy more games and format them to convert them for backup and use your personal emulator.