GameOver Yuzu and Citra

Nintendo would shit on their own birthday cake. Because we focus on products that emulate today we are going to discuss Nintendo celebrating the Switches birthday by grifting itself 2 of the biggest emulators. Even though emulation has been proven legal in court Nintendo has been trying to find a way to stop it since they entered the video game market.

(Full disclosure I in no way support piracy. I 100% believe the creators, developers, distributors, Management, etc. deserve full credit and financials for their IP. I am a supporter of legal emulation for preservation and allowing the end-user to use the content they purchase how they desire.)

I personally own 4 Nintendo Switches and hundreds of games I’ve purchased for myself and my family. As stated I do support playing content you have paid for how you want to play it, especially when it plays better on something else. 

So if you are unaware this past weekend Nintendo celebrated 7 years since the release of the Nintendo Switch. The hybrid gaming console changed and re-energized the gaming industry as a whole. Without the Switch we likely wouldn’t have handhelds like the Steam Deck. We even more likely wouldn’t have such a rapidly growing handheld emulation market. Also Nintendo emulates its own games and resells them to you behind an NSO paywall. Let’s also not forget there was a rom sold to end-users that was pulled from an emulator an internet developer created.

The switch made playing handheld game consoles cool again. But with all good come massive industry crushing disappointment when it comes from the likes of Nintendo. A company that has the practice of preserving video games through selling you revisions 8 times through 6 generations of the same game. When it comes to the Switch Nintendo they used an old underpowered chipset that developers around the world had been working with for years already. 

What this meant for Switch was it took only a matter of months for developers to realise Nintendo didn’t add any additional security and Jailbroke the device. They happened to do the by creating a bridge with a $0.01 paperclip. This opened the free developer market to start making emulators that can play its games almost immediately after the Switch’s release. We have seen a handful of Switch Emulators come and go over the years the last impactful emulator being Skyline. Oddly Skyline is slated to come back out any day now under a new name with a different group of developers. Because this sourcing is open anyone can make their own Forks (versions) of this software using the code that already exists.

There are so many opinions around Yuzu settling for $2.4M with Nintendo today. Was there money being made with code behind a paywall adding additional access to the program… absolutely. But that didn’t give you much more access as within a week or two that build would become available to the general public. It was mostly Patrons paying to debug the software for the masses in order to play with it a few days early. Often Yuzu had multiple updates throughout the day. 

I am in no way a lawyer nor do I play one on the internet so I am naturally going to give you my opinion on what I think happened here. I think Nintendo bluffed and because they are such a powerful company they were able to scare the developers of Yuzu into folding early with a full house. There is a lot of fear about the future of emulation now rightfully so. Nothing Yuzu did was found to be illegal and emulation should continue to be legal. That being said now Nintendo knows they can through their weight around and likely have even smaller developers fold as well. When I said they bluffed I think that the wording and miss representation within their suite gave them away.

The leg of Nintendo’s case was Zelda Tears of the Kingdom being leaked and downloaded more than 1 million times prior to release (there is really no way for them to come up with this 1 million number they had to have just made it up) and that Yuzu put extra attention into the game to make it work. Beyond them having no actual way of knowing how many people downloaded the game early (many of which pre-ordered the game and just got a jump on it yet still already paid for it) it wasn’t Yuzu who made the game playable early. In fact Yuzu refused to go out of their way to optimise the game to work in Yuzu prior to ToTK’s release. Now Ryujinx which is another popular Nintendo Switch Emulator did go out of their way to get ToTK working prior to its official release. Ryujinx was not however part of this lawsuit even though they circumvent Nintendo’s encryption the exact same way. The other takedown we did see today was Citra which is a 3DS emulator  run by the same developers as Yuzu. Nintendo made it a 2 for 1 deal.

Next let’s look at how the lawsuit is worded. There is a drastic difference in the court of law between “Illegal” and “Unlawful”. Things that are Unlawful are not Illegal. It’s more of a moral consideration. We know from past lawsuits that emulation isn’t illegal in fact very legal and Nintendo knows this and instead called it Unlawful. They stated Unlawful over and over while stating data that wasn’t related to Yuzu at all. Yet they were able to get Yuzu to pay $2.4M and write an apology according to Exhibit A that included an apology from Yuzu admitting that they supported piracy (something Yuzu never did). This is a prime example of a Slap Suit from a major corporation with a known reputation of being a bully. 

It’s the wolf in sheep’s clothing. If you are a casual gamer and you like to play games as a family with friendly content (it’s not lost on me that they sell softcore anime porn on their e-shop) then Nintendo to you looks like they are always trying to protect their own property. If you are in the scene you realise that Nintendo doesn’t care about it’s property once they stop making physical cartridges for a device. A good example is the e-stores being shut down from previous systems causing users to lose access to downloading new games. The other thing the end-user loses access to is content they previously paid for. Nintendo is kind enough however to sell you another copy of the same game on their newest hardware. If you really want to play something that you paid for and they took it away you are now required to buy a new gaming console which is hundreds of dollars to then buy the same game you already own but can’t play until you buy it yet again for the new console. Nintendo is notorious for doing this. It is closer in reality to the company that used to own brothels (look it up Nintendo has been trying to hide for generations that it assisted with prostitution by providing room and board) that the company who produced cards for a game that were purchased by the mafia (yes the first game Nintendo made was for gambling by the mob). In reality they are more like the company using the cards in the brothel.

Known by all in this space are what everyone calls the Nintendo Ninjas. There is a good chance that they are reading this article right now. They scour the internet looking for anything that resembles their property so they can strike it down. This doesn’t matter if you are the sole person using/viewing a post or party to a large group of developers making free software for users to preserve their purchased content from Nintend. It is insane the amount of people Nintendo has sued for every dollar they will make for the rest of their lives to the people they put in jail who also still owe Nintendo for every penny they will ever make. (I need to add a disclaimer here, I’m not referencing Bowser, what he did was pirated Nintendo property and sell access to it. That is obviously a completely different morality issue.)

There is a bright light however to Yuzu settling out of court. Nintendo has been wanting a battle for decades now to change the laws around Emulation and wipe it off the face of the internet. Nintendo wants to win a case with someone doing something unlawful so they can make it illegal. It could depend on the judge if they accept this plea deal to recognize what Yuzu did wasn’t illegal and possibly less unlawful than Nintendos daily business practices. There is a small chance that the judge could rule beyond the deal (again not even an armchair lawyer here) which could negatively affect preservation throughout the entire emulation community. 

If only Nintendo had made a more powerful and secure system this wouldn’t have even been possible. Don’t believe me; look to see how much devs are struggling to break Sony’s last generation Playstation 4 console less the current PS5 system. The rule typically is you need a system 8-10x’s more powerful than the device you are trying to emulate. Oddly you can currently emulate a Nintendo Switch on a Nintendo Switch. That should give you a good idea how much they underpowered their own system. Super family friendly right?

My last question is who leaked Tears of The Kingdom? They state in the lawsuit Yuzu being responsible for people playing millions of copies early. If someone attached to Nintendo hadn’t leaked the game early nobody would have been able to attempt to play the game on Yuzu early.

I don’t like reading and I would be willing to bet most gamers don’t like reading either so I am going to end this here. Again not a lawyer, my opinion is from someone who works with emulation in some capacity nearly daily. I have a lot more to say about this and I will likely edit and add in the future.

GameOn Friends

CellPhish