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.
Last edited by LordDaveTheKind on 4 March 2024 at 8:01 pm UTC
I hope Nintendo will choke on the money...
Again this is all speculation, but if true it should be a warning to everyone to just not even entertain the idea of piracy. Companies can and will find out and they will prosecute and (especially in the recent cases with Nintendo) the final judgement will be a strong one.
Still, if anyone's after any Nintendo-style gaming minus Nintendo that can be played on Linux, please swing by the forum and contribute to the game-list (shameless plug, I know, but I think it's worth proving that this particular brand of all-ages gaming can be done without them).
Last edited by Pengling on 4 March 2024 at 8:37 pm UTC
There was that big hoohaa about some N64 emulator that was too good for its time and Nintendo throwing lots of resources to find whomever was responsible for it existing. That didn't stop N64 emulation.
HOW? With what?
Quoting: GuestIdk why emulator devs are dumb enough to do this kinda stuff in the West. Its the same with pirate sites/groups - if you wanna do this do it in a place where US jurisdiction can't reach you. Like Russia, Belarus or China. If Yuzu was in Russia/Belarus/China it would be untouchable.If they hadn't set up as an actual company they would have been a lot safer also, it's a lot harder to sue 5-10 anonymous guys contributing to a git repo.
A company makes you liable.
See more from me