Nintendo Switch Emulator Yuzu And 3DS Emulator Citra Ceases Functioning Over Lawsuits With Nintendo

The official Twitter account of Yuzu, the team of developers who created the Nintendo Switch and 3DS Emulators, announced on Mar 5, 2024, that these emulator have ceased to exist, shutting down all kinds of support and updates.

This is due to Nintendo filing charges against them for piracy on a colossal scale.

As per the joint obedience, Tropic Haze has not only consented to a payment of $2,400,000 to Nintendo, but also asserts that Yuzu is largely engineered to evade and engage in Nintendo Switch gaming activities.

The corporation consents to a complete prohibition on engaging in any activities related to Yuzu, including but not limited to working on Yuzu, hosting Yuzu, distributing Yuzu’s code or features, hosting websites and social media platforms that promote Yuzu, or engaging in any other actions that violate Nintendo’s copyright protection.

The company will relinquish ownership of the yuzu-emu.org domain name to Nintendo, commit to removing not only its copies of Yuzu but also “all circumvention tools utilized for the development or utilization of Yuzu, including TegraRcmGUI, Hekate, Atmosphère, Lockpick_RCM, NDDumpTool, nxDumpFuse, and TegraExplorer.”

Additionally, the company will transfer any “physical circumvention devices” and “modified Nintendo hardware” to Nintendo. Furthermore, it commits to refrain from removing any additional “evidence” that violates Nintendo’s intellectual property rights.

The devs went to Twitter to type out the following message, announcing the discontinuation of the popular open-source Switch and 3DS emulators.

“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.”

Of course, there will be substitutes for the emulators but Yuzu was a big player in the community and this would act as an eye-opener for future developers attempting to create emulators like this.

Source: The Verge