Nintendo is suing the makers of the Switch emulator Yuzu, claims 'There is no lawful way to use Yuzu'
Nintendo of America is suing the maker of the Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu, saying it «unlawfully circumvents the technological measures» that prevent Switch games from being played on other hardware.
Yuzu has been around for ages—we talked about using it to run Pokémon: Let's Go back in 2018—but it was The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom that really brought it front-and-center for mainstream gamers. One day after the Switch-exclusive game went live, the Yuzu developers said they had it running at "full speed on most hardware," with «no hacks needed.»
That was great for Nintendo fans, but Nintendo was clearly less enthused. The lawsuit (available in full on Scribd, via Stephen Totilo) describes emulators as «a piece of software that allows users to unlawfully play pirated videogames that were published only for a specific console on a general-purpose computing device,» and cites Tears of the Kingdom, which leaked ahead of release, as a specific example of such. Yuzu publicly took steps to discourage piracy on its Discord, but Nintendo nonetheless pointed the finger at the emulator as the problem.
«Infringing copies of the game that circulated online were able to be played in Yuzu, and those copies were successfully downloaded from pirate websites over one million times before the game was published and made available for lawful purchase by Nintendo,» the lawsuit states. «Many of the pirate websites specifically noted the ability to play the game file in Yuzu.»
This of course isn't the first time emulators have been accused of encouraging piracy: In 1999, Sony sued a company called Connectix, the maker of a PlayStation emulator called the Virtual Game Station, over allegations of copyright infringement and various violations of its intellectual property rights. Connectix actually won the case: Among other things, the court said «Sony understandably seeks control over the market for devices that play games Sony produces or licenses,» but ruled that copyright
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