Nintendo Switch Emulator Yuzu Officially Shut Down, Devs to pay Nintendo $2.4 Million

Late last month Nintendo officially filed suit against the makers of Yuzu, one of the most popular Switch emulators. While most expected the case to drag on in typical legal fashion, it turns out it’s already been settled, and not in Yuzu’s favor.

Per the settlement agreement between Nintendo and developer Tropic Haze, the latter will cease “offering to the public, providing, marketing, advertising, promoting, selling, testing, hosting, cloning, distributing, or otherwise trafficking Yuzu or any source code or features of Yuzu.” In addition to that, the makers of Yuzu have to pay Nintendo $2.4 million in damages.

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While some who didn’t want to hear it wouldn’t accept it, Yuzu’s chances in this case were not good. While emulators are legal in broad terms, Yuzu circumvents Nintendo’s encryption, and apparently, the devs provided detailed instructions for obtaining keys needed to play emulated games amongst other no-nos. Turning Yuzu into a for-profit enterprise with a Patreon probably also didn’t help matters!

A message has been posted to Discord confirming the shutdown of Yuzu, and perhaps the 3DS emulator Citra, with the devs making the rather implausible claim they were always anti-piracy and have just now realized what some were using their emulator for.

“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