Yuzu, the creator of a popular Switch emulator, has agreed to pay Nintendo $2.4 million in damages and officially announced the firm is shutting down.
Tropic Haze, the creator of the Switch emulator Yuzu, was sued by Nintendo last month for violating the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and accusing the creators of copyright infringement. After Nintendo sued Tropic Haze in a US federal court, the emulator makers agreed to pay $2.4 million to settle the lawsuit.
In addition to paying Nintendo $2.4 million in damages, Tropic Haze has stated that Yuzu is “primarily designed to circumvent and play Nintendo Switch games.” The company agreed to end development for Yuzu permanently and stop the website or social media accounts that advertise Yuzu or any other activities that would violate Nintendo’s copyright protections.
Nintendo stated in its initial lawsuit documents that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the biggest Switch release of 2023 had been pirated more than a million times in the week and a half before its May release.
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Tropic Haze Shutting Down Yuzu
Yuzu and Citra developers confirmed in the Yuzu Discord that service and support Nintendo Switch and Nintendo 3DS emulators will be ending effective immediately. Following their announcement on Discord, the developers posted on Twitter that the firm is also being closed permanently.
Hello yuz-ers and Citra fans:
We write today to inform you that yuzu and yuzu’s 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 Nintendo’s 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.
@yuzuemu on Twitter/X
Following the announcement on Discord and Twitter, the source code for both Yuzu and Citra has been removed from GitHub. Moreover, Yuzu’s socials have been completely cleared before the shutdown. Before the service’s global shutdown, Yuzu’s social media accounts were removed, bringing the more than six-year-old service to a sad ending.
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