Image: Nintendo
Popular Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu is shutting down for good.
The creators of the popular Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu have announced its shutdown this week, after a lawsuit from Nintendo ended in a costly $2.4 million settlement. Yuzu owner Tropic Haze was accused by Nintendo of copyright infringement among other offences, and will now be forced to take not only Yuzu down, but its Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra as well.
Yuzu and Citra emulators to shut down for good
The creators of Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu will now have to pay $2.4 million in accordance with both parties’ recent settlement. Nintendo and Yuzu owner Tropic Haze had both filed for a final judgment on the court case on Monday this week, but it ultimately ended in Nintendo’s favour. The settlement was reached with a clear ultimatum: Tropic Haze must cease development on Yuzu and the Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra.
It doesn’t end there, however - the company will also have to remove all of its official resources for the emulators online and cease distributing, branding and marketing work on the products as well. As of today, the emulators’ website, GitHub repositories and Patreon page have already been wiped from existence. The Nintendo Switch emulator’s developer Bunnei confirmed as much on Discord, writing:
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.
For anyone not in the loop, Yuzu is a free-to-use Nintendo Switch emulator first released back in 2018, allowing anyone without access to the Nintendo console to play its exclusive games on other platforms. Most people would have used it to play pirated games without paying for them. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom famously had a pirated copy leaked online before release, leading to spoilers of the game surfacing before its official launch. Others use emulators like Yuzu and Citra as a form of videogame preservation, keeping games alive after their original release platforms become defunct.