After Nintendo recently filed a lawsuit against the Yuzu team, it was pretty much inevitable this was going to happen wasn't it. The end of Yuzu is officially here.
Nintendo and Tropic Haze LLC (Yuzu) filed a joint motion for the court to enter Final Judgment and Permanent Injunction, so as I understand it's not quite final until the judge stamps it.
As a result the Yuzu team have announced their intention to shut everything down, and have agreed to pay Nintendo $2.4M USD in damages. As per the other document, Yuzu will also transfer the domain name used over to Nintendo and they have agreed to delete every single thing related to Yuzu that they have.
Writing in the yuzu Discord (and posted on X) the developer bunnei said:
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.
Update 05/03/24: While "support of Citra" was a bit ambiguous, it's now confirmed Citra is also gone. The website is down and replaced with the statement, the GitHub is also gone.
Considering it's open source though, and has been out in the wild for some time now, it's unlikely this is truly the end because it's been so widely circulated. However, it will make it a lot harder for anyone seeking it out, and no doubt put off anyone from doing anything with Yuzu code they might still have.
For now, the Ryujinx project at least still exists and as far as I know hasn't had Nintendo come knocking — yet.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
ExpandingMan Mar 4
Last edited by ExpandingMan on 4 March 2024 at 9:59 pm UTC
Last edited by Essoje on 4 March 2024 at 10:19 pm UTC
A company does not make you liable if it's an LLC. It's called Limited Liability Company for a reason. In order to go after individuals you have to prove that the company and the individual for practical purposes the same. If finances weren't separated, for example, if individuals took money directly from the company's bank account for personal expenses instead of paying themselves a salary or dividends, they can be held liable.
There's no unfairness or injustice here. Nintendo does have deep pockets and throws its weight around but in this case there was no abuse. Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls reverse engineering protection systems "legally risky". Businesses have been created around protecting game developers against Switch emulation. You don't pay someone to protect you unless you expect to lose sales, which makes obvious that harm has been done.
As far as I understand Nintendo did not accuse Yuzu of the leaks, but that it allowed illegal leaked versions to be played due to circumventing protection measures. I don't like when Nintendo goes after non-commercial fan games a bunch of students developed, but in this case (just like with Gary Bowser) this was an illegal business.
NathanaelKStottlemyer Mar 4
And we've just lose Citra too, as if it was not enough.
Also, when these devs will stop to get their code on Github?! Self-hosting in the EU! I'm so mad.
Quoting: NathanaelKStottlemyerJust earlier, I cloned the repo. If anyone wants the code, I can put it on codeburg.I did too some days ago, I don't know if your one have more commits to it though.
Seriously that's enough. I'm thinking about a script or software to clone repos automatically and regularly to save the projects that I like the most. Do you guys already doing this? If you know a good tip let me/us know, thanks!
And for actual projects and future ones, does some sort of a guide exist to prevent that sort of thing? I mean to have the better protection from the start, and if not, I really think that some people should look into it. Like the guides we can find about privacy etc. We need this.
BlackBloodRum Mar 4
People comply to corporate control too easily these days.
pleasereadthemanual Mar 4
I'm surprised Nintendo was pursuing a settlement at all. I thought they would have wanted this to go to trial.
This is the best outcome re: legality of emulation. No court judgments were made.
Quoting: cozThere's no way such a quick agreement would happen unless the defendants knew they were going to be declared guilty.Ah, no. That is absolutely not the case. As I noted above, in a case like this it doesn't really matter if you would win the case in the courts (given an adequate supply of lawyers to make the playing field even-ish). The point is, it would cost multiple millions to defend such a case, more money than a small company has (and, far more than they settled for). It is very likely they wouldn't have had the dough to make it to the finish line. Even if they did, and won, their chances of getting their legal costs awarded are probably not great, so even a win would still leave them far more broke than from just rolling over.
So neither the decision to declare a loss nor the groveling statement that they were oh, so wrong (which was certainly a condition of the settlement) says anything at all about the merits of Nintendo's lawsuit.
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