Switch emulator Yuzu shuts down in $2.4 million settlement with Nintendo

thesixthaxis.com:

Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu has shut down with immediate effect, as creators Tropic Haze have quickly settled the lawsuit with Nintendo for $2.4 million. Tropic Haze will be shutting down themselves, as well as ending support of their Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra as part of an agreement not to develop Nintendo emulators in future.

It’s a swift victory for Nintendo, who had sued Tropic Haze last week in what many feared could be a test of the viability of community created emulators going forward. Nintendo had argued in their filing that Tropic Haze were liable because, while not distributing pirated software, the emulator’s circumvention of Switch software encryption made them “secondarily liable” – in particular, Nintendo pointed to the rampant pre-launch piracy of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom last year, which led to an uptick in Patreon support for Yuzu.

After getting legal advice over the past week, Tropic Haze clearly felt it best not to face off against one of the most litigious companies in video games.

This does mean that game encryption circumvention isn’t being tested in the courts, so emulation will retain its legal grey area for personal use backups and the sort, but the main reason for the suit was that Nintendo could point to Yuzu having profited from an association with piracy – they also pointed directly to methods to break encryption for yourself. Emulator creators are often very cautious and careful not to associate themselves with piracy, which Yuzu had become.

Writing on their Discord (retrieved by IGN), the team writes, “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 authorised