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.
I.e.: why even bother copying the games in question when there's decades worth of competition that won't give you manure for playing on a device of your choice?
Last edited by emphy on 5 March 2024 at 3:31 am UTC
legluondunet Mar 5
Quoting: legluondunetIf Yuzu was able to pay $2.4 million, is it because their Patreon brought in that much?
...
Either that or some of the devs also added a bit from other sources of income, extra mortgages and/or other loans.
Last edited by emphy on 5 March 2024 at 3:36 am UTC
Quoting: s01itudeWithout going into too many details my main suspicion here is that Nintendo obtained logs from discord that exposed the development team of some illegal activities
This is what I suspect too, and it make the entire thing make more sense. If it was just them taking down Yuzu I wouldn't think this, but for them to pay that amount of money without fighting is a bit suspicious.
Quoting: EssojeIf anyone comes across the technology necessary to punch people through the monitor, but specifically corporate lawyers that deal with copy"""right""", please do inform me. I have great interest on the potential uses of such an advancement, which could likely send us into the next step of our evolution.im researching exactly this tech right now! but i need help with funding, 2.4 million to be precise.
Quoting: GuestBut this isn't about piracy. Oh, sure, they can say they were "enabling" piracy, but the key issue is that they allegedly enabled the piracy by enabling tampering with a "digital lock" (encryption, DRM et cetera). Such tampering is forbidden under the DMCA, and there are similar provisions in other countries. But it's entirely legal in the EU, is if anything a consumer right.Quoting: Purple Library GuyI would recommend that the next people who take the code and continue developing it under a different name, host it in some place like the EU and have some kind of region lock where they don't allow downloads from places with DMCA-type anti-digital-lock-tampering laws. Of course, since the code is open and all some people will then mirror it in other places and it will become available around the world--but that will not be the core project's fault, as they will be taking due measures to prevent it.
EU is a terrible idea as it is under US jurisdiction being US vassal states. The EU has gone after piracy before (Sweden, Italy, Germany). Russia/Belarus/China are much better about it, especially now
And while the EU is definitely under the US thumb in terms of geopolitics, their regimes in terms of laws around computing and telecommunications are really quite different, whether it's about privacy, competition or "intellectual property", and the EU shows no signs of interest in harmonizing their approach with the US one.
Quoting: CalebQ42I don't think so. I mean, it's not impossible, it's not even implausible exactly. I just don't think this result is evidence of such a thing.Quoting: s01itudeWithout going into too many details my main suspicion here is that Nintendo obtained logs from discord that exposed the development team of some illegal activities
This is what I suspect too, and it make the entire thing make more sense. If it was just them taking down Yuzu I wouldn't think this, but for them to pay that amount of money without fighting is a bit suspicious.
So first, $2.4 million sounds like a lot, but it sounds a lot smaller once you start thinking about the bucks needed to defend a lawsuit against the likes of Nintendo. And second, they're not going to pay $2.4 million. Because, the company is liable not the individuals, the company no longer has a reason to exist, and the company almost certainly does not have $2.4 million on hand. It's going to declare bankruptcy and Nintendo will get some insignificant sum of money, but Nintendo will not care because the point of the exercise was not money but a headline and the people apologizing abjectly. So the $2.4 million is a fiction to impress people like us if we don't think about it too hard.
Quoting: legluondunetIf Yuzu was able to pay $2.4 million, is it because their Patreon brought in that much?
Quoting: TheRiddickQuoting: Luke_NukemHOW? With what?
Probably from the millions they hoovered up from Patreon!
Again, they're not going to pay $2.4 million. Just because there's an announcement doesn't mean anyone involved expects it to happen.
Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 5 March 2024 at 5:16 am UTC
Last edited by ToddL on 5 March 2024 at 5:33 am UTC
redneckdrow Mar 5
The way they went after Yuzu was by arguing that it is not just an emulator, that it is a tool used primarily for piracy. Because they're still selling the Switch. Cracking encryption on proprietary hardware that is still on the market is legally dubious at best. I believe Nintendo to be incorrect in assuming that the majority pirated games, but the burden of proof against that would be too great, even in civil court.
Just look at what happened to the guy that cracked the Switch firmware in the first place. Modern Vintage Gamer did a whole video series about why he gives the emulation community a bad name.
Things like this are why I only use emulators for discontinued platforms. In that case, it's much harder for a company to say that it affects their bottom line.
Ripping my own cartridges requires a lot of pain on my part (there are a few different pi-based solutions that lessen that pain today), but it's better than risking a $500,000 dollar fine or five years in prison. Ripping floppies or discs is considerably easier in most cases. I tend to use cdrdao or ddrescue.
Outright piracy of a game still commercially available is theft, no matter how you slice it. Backing up your existing games for a discontinued platform isn't.
I have a couple of 90's-00s games that would be expensive as heck to replace, so I keep the physical copies locked up in a fire-resistant safe and play them via emulation.
If you're interested in Sony v. Bleem, Gaming Historian did a video on the whole debacle. Bleem may have run like a piece of garbage, but every emulation project today owes it a debt.
Quoting: cozBusinesses 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.
Say what now? If you think you will lose sales on other platforms, then you make your game available on those platforms, you don't pay for some protection racket. That sounds pretty Mafia?
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