Yuzu emulator developers settle Nintendo lawsuit, pay $2.4M in damages

Obviously piracy plays a large (maybe the largest?) role here, though I wouldn't overlook the modding use case. I would be quite interested in running titles I legitimately own on more powerful hardware where I can play around with the resolution and framerate freely (and would have already used Yuzu for this purpose by now, but for laziness).

I don’t think preservation is an important argument. If I own an AppleTV, and I purchase a movie through their service, why should it be illegal for me to export that movie to watch on a different device? I own the hardware and the data, why would any law even care at that point?

Obviously piracy should be illegal, but I just don’t see any argument against emulation even if it is current.

Folks. This is not about piracy at all. It is also not about copyrights or whatever.

It's about the shitty part of DMCA's anti-circumvention.

If you want to see how stupid this law is, look at the number of exemptions given for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...

Hold up, Yuzu was an actual company and had a Patreon bringing in over $29k a month? Yeah um, Nintendo has been bad but that's a choice for a current console. It is no surprise Nintendo went after them.

LOL

Yeah, as much as I am an anti-fan of Nintendo, it sounds like this company was asking to get sued.

emulating a current console is not about preservation. It just isn't

So we should all just wait until they stop selling a console before working to emulate it?

Just imagine if they had this attitude when it came to reverse engineering IBM PC's bios.

But, emulating a current console is not about preservation.

Today's present is tomorrow's past.

But, emulating a current console is not about preservation. It just isn't.

I disagree in the general case. Sure, beware of litigious companies, but it isn't immoral.

In the specific case of Yuzu bringing in cash from the endeavor, yes, I see why Nintendo did what they did.

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Totally off-topic, but I have never bought a Switch despite liking the idea of all the games on it, because I don't want to pay $600 for a gameboy, 2-4 real controllers and a copy of Mario Party. I can't understand how it or Steam Deck is popular. But that's just me.

So long as Nintendo doesn't end up going after emulators released before the Switch, then the de facto (not de jure) precedent is: don't release an emulator for their current latest console.

Overall, that's probably a mostly fine outcome for game preservation, and thinking about it more, it's probably much better for emulation and game preservation long term that Yuzu's devs settled instead of fighting this, as if they had lost and a legal precedent were set, many other emulators might have had to shut down or be hosted in countries where the DMCA doesn't apply. But with no legal precedent set here, emulators for consoles released before the Switch might very well be safe. Time will tell though.

emulating a current console is not about preservation. It just isn't. You can try to say it is, but no. Maybe, maybe you could argue that you are putting in the work now so it's ready when it's needed. But then be careful about putting it out there.

What do you think of piracy in general? When would you consider pirating a PC game would be acceptable?

The reality is that the modern gaming industry is actively hostile to the consumer. Content is locked behind intrusive DRM, store front exclusivity deals, licensing terms that may revoke your access at any point, obnoxious launchers, always online requirements, reliance on servers that may disappear at any moment, insidious subscriptions, microtransactions, and many other schemes ranging from shady to borderline illegal. Hype-driven marketing pushing pre-orders based on lies, followed by empty promises of multi-year roadmaps to get games in a playable state. Yearly releases of rehashed and reskinned content, low-effort and premature "remasters"... The list goes on and on.

Is someone who plays a pirated version of a game they purchased, but can't access anymore, in the wrong? Or how about if they prefer the pirated version because it gives a better experience? Or how about if they're tired of always getting the short end of the stick by playing by the rules? The law says they are, but are they really?

The morality here is not so black and white.

BTW, I agree with you that Yuzu was clearly overstepping the boundaries, and that it's no surprise Nintendo took them out. I just think that Nintendo doesn't necessarily have the moral high ground, and that there's a strong argument in favor of not only emulation, but piracy.

But, emulating a current console is not about preservation. It just isn't.

No, but it CAN be used as a tool to play legitimate copies of games on different hardware. A few people on this thread have said they do this. I haven't done it yet, but I'll probably dump the Switch games I want to play on my Deck instead of carrying the switch also.

I believe that Yuzu includes a standalone implementation of the Switch firmware but can run user-provided firmware because a few games have compatibility issues, and it doesn't run Nintendo's own OS software (you can't run the Switch system menu on it, for example).

But to your larger point: Nintendo being mad about people sharing Switch ROMs or Yuzu funding their work shouldn't have any bearing on the actual legal question of whether Yuzu violates the DMCA anti-circumvention clause. Dolphin argued after legal consultation that inclusion of these keys qualifies under exceptions for interoperability; Yuzu doesn't include the keys at all. It doesn't appear to have been a question tested in the courts yet.

That point _does_ matter if you're making a moral argument about whether Yuzu crossed a line, but given that emulation has been commonplace for almost the entirety of Nintendo's video game business and it has done very little to stop them from staying on top of the game industry, but has enabled millions to experience and be inspired by games they would've otherwise never have been able to play, I'm not terribly convinced that $23k a month in donations is wrong for people putting in serious engineering work into a project that enables that.

EDIT3: "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, was unlawfully distributed a week and a half before its release"

The game was leaked. How is that the fault of the yuzu devs?

Yuzu people were running a company selling (on Patreon) "Early Access" to emulator features and access to a private Discord where there was A LOT of user-uploaded Switch ROM dumps floating around and the moderators (employed by the company charging for access) were extremely happy to look the other way.

This is completely false. The yuzu developers were in no way distributing games or keys to the public, and this was not stated in the lawsuit.

They were, however, known to distribute games and keys amongst themselves in private discord chats for development purposes, and this could've been used as evidence against them if they tried to fight the case.

Thank you for providing the sober explanation of what really happened here, I knew there had to be more to it, but didn’t care enough to dig in.

It’s surprising that someone runs a business like you describe in your post from a jurisdiction where Nintendo can actually get to them.

I really don’t want to support piracy, but there are many countries where Nintendo could never get any access to the company. And all those countries have the internet too.

I mean even the name choice "Tropic Haze" kind of hints at sailing the high seas ;)

Can you explain how?

include pre-decrypted ROM dumps from the actual Switch hardware, like for example the OS bootloader

Is that known to be illegal currently? Or is that currently still a grey area in the law?

I mean even the name choice "Tropic Haze" kind of hints at sailing the high seas

1. We know this woman is a witch because she looks like one.

2. We know this woman is a witch because she dresses like one.

3. We know this woman is a witch because she has a wart.

4. We know this woman is a witch because she turned someone into a newt.

5. One burns witches.

6. One burns wood.

7. Witches burn because they are made out of wood.

8. Bridges are made of wood.

9. However, bridges are multiply realizable. They can be built from stone. [Implied] Building a bridge out of the woman will not determine that she is made of wood.

10. Wood floats in water.

11. A duck floats in water [bread, apples, very small rocks, cider, gravy, cherries, mud, churches, lead].

12. If the woman weighs the same as a duck, then she is made of wood.

13. The woman weighs the same as a duck.

14. Therefore, the woman is a witch.

more leaps of logic.

[editing to add: with apologies to https://blog.apaonline.org/2019/06/27/monty-python-witch-tri...]

It's double as funny because Discord knows of the piracy going on (since they have direct access to all user data and metadata), but the "rights owners" don't pay them enough in the back door to catch them.

I doubt that Nintendo was aware of any of that, aside from maybe the Patreon, when they decided to initiate the litigation process. The Patreon was admittedly risky, but as far as I can tell the settlement states that the emulator itself is illegal as per the DMCA, regardless of whether or not they were making money off of it. If a precedent is set here, it is quite dangerous.

Also, doesn't Yuzu itself include pre-decrypted ROM dumps from the actual Switch hardware, like for example the OS bootloader ?

As other commenters have pointed out, Yuzu did not include any Nintendo copyrighted assets, so this is wrong.

Also worth noting is that while the "Early Access" changes were not kept secret, the Yuzu team went out of its way to make it harder than necessary to replicate an equivalent build from the public Git repo (there was no public EA branch, just a bunch of PRs with a specific tag) and aggressively disapproved of anyone actually forking the project or providing unofficial builds. They couldn't actually stop anyone under the license, but anyone doing so risked being blackballed/banned from official spaces, and in one case a Yuzu developer allegedly even altered the copyright notice on a contribution because it referenced a provider of unofficial EA-equivalent builds [1].

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/ljxnvi/yuzu_stol...

Yuzu developers didn't put themselves in a favorable position from the community perspective by doing DMCAs and cease-and-desists on people redistributing "early access" builds.. of GPL licensed source code. And the CLA drama, and so on. Ryujinx isn't affected by the self-proclaimed "necessity of productization" of emulation software, and the recent events are not surprising. Some might even say they painted a target on their back.

I immediatly had a chain of questions:

* how will they pay $2M?

* why did they settle for that much?

* isn't strict emulation legal? Maybe not in the US...

* is there something fishy that was hidden somewhere?

some grapevine reports indicate yuzu paid reviewers with early access to some games for pre-retail dumps that were then used to have speedy day1 compat.

it could be wrong, totk just leaked a week before release.

give their domain to Nintendo

So, Nintendo will receive all future Yuzu's telemetry.

Nintendo’s disdain for historical preservation is frustrating and problematic. But this is an emulator for their current console, I’m not sure this is boycott-worthy. This is more, they’ve got a business to run, and Yuzu impacts their bottom line in a way that Dolphin doesn’t.

I stopped playing Nintendo products (on any platform, including my Switch) years ago and haven't really missed much. They put out good games, sure, but there are tons of good games available on other platforms where buying them isn't supporting a company that abuses the legal system to harass and imprison innocent people.

I disagree. The other platforms built their walls secure enough that they don't bother. Nintendo is aggressively defending a low fence.

Most Nintendo cartridges will function a decade from now. Many discs for other consoles don't even have the full game on it... and many can't function without connecting to a service. I'd prefer the system that is possible to preserve (but gets aggressive with monetization) then the one that's impossible to preserve.

Points to xbox for doing well with backwards compatibility and carrying libraries forward. But that could change in future.

There's no point boycotting one company playing by the system rules. Boycott the system which enable this much centralisation of power and removes freedom from citizens.

Copyright and patents are an artifact of the government being easily corruptible by media companies who make insane amount of money.

Until we get rid of the government we'll always have laws which help the rich steal from the people.

might this be a company that's worth boycotting? Sure I'd miss out on the exclusives but lots of games exist on multiple platforms or have similar games on other platforms.

As far as I'm concerned, this is an issue of the DMCA more than Nintendo itself. In the strictest sense, devs really don't care about this and lawyers are only doing their job.

Boycotting Nintendo may make sense in a moral sense, but not one that will change how the DMCA works.

Nintendo's behaviour seems to be very much anti hacker and even anti-consumer in cases like this one. Anyone else have any strong feelings about this?

Anti-hacker, sure. 99% of companies are anti-hacker.

Anti-consumer... First, I really think this is the worst modern cliche of modern media discourse. Just to remind people of the definition:

Anti-consumerism is concerned with the private actions of business corporations in pursuit of financial and economic goals at the expense of the public welfare, especially in matters of environmental protection, social stratification, and ethics in the governing of a society.

I don't really see how luxury entertainment can ever meet the true philosophical meaning of the term that halts social progress and suppressing the flow of money to the populace.

With all that said, the closest I feel Nintendo has gotten to anti-consumerism is the "vault" strategy done with Mario All Stars. Which they seemingly only did for that game and a few of those "100 multiplayer" style games. It's a strategy making use of false scarcity for a product that can be infinitely reproducible (and requires no servers on their end to operate) in order to increase urgency to play/buy said work. Not only is that morally repugnant, I'm not even sure if it's a financially sound decision for a company who's products are known for having a long tail in sales, unlike most video games.

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in the colloquial sense of:

not favorable to consumers : improperly favoring the interests of businesses over the interests of consumers.

every business technically strides to be anti-consumerist. The act of charging money for a product is anti-consumerist. I don't see how Nintendo differs here, nor how they are the worst, in a world where almost every AAA company in the west is trying to rely on psuedo-subscriptions with battle passes and every company in the east are making millions on mobile off of the lootbox model.

Nintendo seemed to dip their toes in indirectly a few times (reminder: they do not fully own any of the remaining IPs using Lootboxes) but mostly have pulled out, even removing the gacha from a few of their games. So they for the most part simply profit from an online service with "free" games and one time purchase of other console games.

I've been "boycotting" them for a while now. Switch was cool, but they just cannot be reasonable when it comes to IP, so I just cannot stomach giving them any money. I'm not interested in applicable laws or "playing by the rules" or whatever other handwavy bullshit people will feed themselves to pretend that Nintendo is "in the right" here.

It's pretty simple: don't target people who aren't doing things that are morally reprehensible, even if it's a systemic threat to your company (cue the laughter from the capitalists who can't understand anything beyond industrial machinations). Evolve and adapt to include them in your assets, or die while the fitter companies do. Someday, someone's going to have more money than Nintendo and they will force Nintendo to do whatever they want them to. I'm just hoping its sooner rather than later. They've earned every second of their demise. Fuck any company that thinks lawfare is excusable as 'might makes right'.

Personally, I only get DRM-free games, which mostly means GOG at this point (they also have a better refund policy). They have some issues too but seem to be much better than any other game stores in terms of customer friendly policies (unless you really want Linux support). I definitely wouldn't switch to Sony or Microsoft from Nintendo, that would make no sense (surprisingly there are a few Sony published games on GOG, although the latest announced one was supposed to be released a few months ago now so I'm suspicious that Sony was trying to sneak some DRM in and got caught). Reguarding Steam some would argue the Linux support makes up for the DRM, although I can't agree with that. Most of the other small platforms I've seen have DRM but with little or no positive. Itch mostly has solo developer games, doesn't clearly indicate if a game has DRM or not but mostly has DRM-free games, and has no refund policy other than what individual developers decide to do. Humble used to have some DRM-free games but has moved away from that under current ownership.

Nintendo's stalking and profiling of Neimod[1] has made it hard for me to justify giving them money.

The leak that exposed that information showed it was part of Nintendo's larger 5-step plan to bully and silence the homebrew scene.

[1] https://www.technadu.com/nintendo-spying-3ds-hacker-neimod-t...

Nintendo's been a horrible company in this regard for ages. Personally I've never given them money besides for Tears of the Kingdom when it released - I don't even own a Switch, I borrowed one to play it. They make good games sometimes but that's the first and last time they're getting any money from me.

Nintendo started with consoles and the quality sign to make sure you buy quality after people were disappointed with Atari and other systems

And the target audience is still kids/family. Playing games doesn't need to be PC first or mobile first and it hinders quality.

Nintendo has the same right as Sony and ms to sell their system.

I would love to have it for PC, don't get me wrong, but families don't play games in front of a PC.

I don't think this argument is fair.

You're assuming Nintendo doesn't file DMCA takedowns; especially considering they've literally just won a court case against it. And even if you are outside the US, I wouldn't be surprised if European service providers don't want to risk it because they are still under copyright treaties, of which the DMCA is just the US implementation.

They’d just jump to Ryujinx where it is still legal

Seems to be up still...

Edit: he's dead, Jim

FYI, forks don't survive DMCA purges. You need to clone a repo and then push it to a new repository.

There look to be an awful lot of forks created in the last week:

https://github.com/roblabla/yuzu/forks?include=active&page=1...

Considering the ongoing attacks against GitHub whereby people are creating repos with malicious code, it's probably wise to be bloody careful of any of these yuzu forks. :( :( :(

Cloned it a couple days ago.

When you find a mirror, you can look for this commit, and know that if the commit hash matches it is probably a legit copy of the repo up until that point at least

  commit dc94882c9062ab88d3d5de35dcb8731111baaea2 (HEAD -> master)
  Merge: 30567a590 fc6a87bba
  Author: liamwhite <liamwhite@users.noreply.github.com>
  Date:   Tue Feb 27 12:26:26 2024 -0500
  
      Merge pull request #13135 from german77/hid-interface
      
      service: hid: Migrate HidServer to new IPC

Software Heritage has it archived.

https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/search/?q=github...

Just to add my two cents, software repositories like Ubuntu's still have the thing, with the source and the build readily downloadable. Not the latest, but still.

https://packages.ubuntu.com/mantic/yuzu

Boom https://archive.org/details/yuzu.7z (archived by me from a git mirror; all git remotes removed before zipping)

The legality of emulation was strongly upheld under pre-DMCA copyright law in U.S. court decisions where console makers lost against emulator developers.

SCEA v. Bleem was filed in 1999, and the DMCA came into effect in 1998.

Reminder that the EFF is challenging section 1201 as unconstitutional: https://www.eff.org/cases/green-v-us-department-justice

Can you give examples of some of those lost cases? Specifically emulation related ones?

The same as in John Deere's case. You can fix your tractor but you will break the software patents

Nintendo is the worst, and your entire gaming experience will be better on Yuzu or Ryujinx.

Sad to see this happen to the Yuzu squad.

But in no world can I buy a retro game on arbitrary platform X and then also play it on arbitrary platforms P, Q or R.

But I understand why Nintendo doesn't want that

This part I really don't understand. Nintendo has clearly got the technology at play to run everything at least prior to the GameCube on the Switch, ready to roll... but the only way to access those games is to pay for a subscription service which is already kind of annoying, only to then get a drip-feed of a few games every few months, selected by... somebody, no idea who, with no real consistency as to what makes the cut and what doesn't. It's, by all accounts, completely fucking arbitrary.

I love the Switch, it's IMO, the best console Nintendo's turned out in actual decades, and if I was given the option I would buy the shit out of a large library of games from previous Nintendo consoles, and given how many 3rd party projects have made playing those games on all manner of shit, chiefly desktop PCs, a possible thing, I struggle to really sympathize with Nintendo here. And again: the groundwork for this is already laid. I don't know how much work goes between, for example, taking a SNES title like Super Mario RPG and putting it on the Switch's virtual SNES console, but given that their virtual SNES has essentially the same features that every bog standard SNES emulator has had for over 10 years... you'll have to forgive me if I don't think it's much? If any?

I would absolutely understand if they want to playtest each game, make sure it's optimized, make sure there's no graphical oddities, etc. etc. but like... you can do that. I could do that. And hell, if a game made it through with some big glitch, give me the option to send your devs a fuckin email about it in-game with a dump of the memory at the time it happened so they can fix it.

But no, instead, peacemeal releases of games, on a subscription service only, that range from absolutely S-tier iconic to... what the fuck is this in terms of cultural significance. Instead of just a bloody storefront, and let me pick what I want, and pay a reasonable price for it. I'd bet anything if they charged like $9.99 per game for the entire library of NES, SNES, and N64 titles, they'd be absolutely swimming in money.

Like... the big corpos have never understood, this is what gave Steam the position they have now. Piracy is work. Hacking consoles is work. Installing and playing cracked games is work (and risk!). I don't want to work, I want to fucking play Donkey Kong. Give me a legal way to give you a reasonable amount of money so I can play Donkey Kong! And then I get Donkey Kong and you get money! It's the dictionary definition of a win/win scenario.

I simply can’t get used to the entitlement of gamers, it’s on a whole nother level. This person writes as if the authors mugged their mother, but the problem is “your emu stopped working on my computer”.

Big companies don't wait for some rando to complain to take these kinds of enforcement actions. Chances are it was already well underway by the time he typed up his message.

I mean, yes? I'm not sure why you think you've exposed some kind of secret motivation. Yuzu is not the same thing as Dolphin: it's emulating a current console and is very obviously primarily for facilitating piracy, not historical preservation; people arguing otherwise are fucking kidding themselves. Of course it's about Nintendo protecting hardware sales.

Indeed I suspect a large part of the motivation for this lawsuit is the upcoming Switch 2, which will be using essentially the same architecture. A huge part of the necessary work for emulating it has already been done by Yuzu and Ryujinx.

I honestly don't think it's 99%

And shutting down development is the wrong thing to do no matter what.

and the software would only load games which were actually plugged in

That screws over anyone with a laptop or handheld, who can't just put all their games on a nearby shelf.

If Nintendo sold a download to the .ROM files plus updates on their website, I'm sure a decent percentage would buy them.

Not really... No actual court decision so not precedence yet... Someone can try to fight it and kill it.

Who exactly is going to start doing very difficult work knowing that they will immediately be sued by an extremely rich company that operates worldwide?

Different fixes over 100s of different repos lol

And 0 of them with any Tropic Haze developers.

Anyone have a recent fork to grab from before it becomes harder to find?

Yuzu was such a well polished emulator.

I guess that depends on your definition of "well polished emulator". From what I hear, it is not well polished.

Source?

Their Patreon earns over €27,000 a month. I imagine that was factored into the amount. [1]

[1] https://www.patreon.com/yuzuteam

Last official builds https://archive.org/details/citra-latest-builds-4th-march-20...

Same thoughts. They should triple-up their public image efforts and make sure any shared ROM link on Ryujinx controlled infrastructure results in a ban or something, otherwise Nintendo comes for them next.

Yuzu, as it is now, won't go anywhere, because it's an open source project. Whatever is working right now, kind of always will in the future.

It seems like it's $2.4M from the company Tropic Haze LLC which will probably pay what it can and then declare bankruptcy and close, so that the developers aren't paying $2.4M.

Is it really "playable" on Android, at least 30 fps? Doesn't it overheats easily?

Not hard at all, development will definitely be continued to some degree but likely not by the original developers, since most of them didn't do a great job of obscuring their identities and won't want to take the risk.