Last week, Nintendo filed a lawsuit against Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu, arguing that the software allowed players to pirate games like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom before its official release. In total, Nintendo said that Tears of the Kingdom was downloaded over one million times in the week leading up to its retail launch, though the software enabled piracy as a whole for the hybrid console. The lawsuit has now been settled with Yuzu’s creator made to pay $2.4 million in damages.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Yuzu’s creator Tropic Haze has agreed to pay Nintendo $2.4 million in damages after the company claimed that the software was “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale.” Yesterday, the two companies mutually agreed on a monetary settlement and permanent injunction that stipulates Tropic Haze may no longer offer or market the Switch emulator or any of its source code online.
Additionally, Tropic Haze is no longer allowed to create future software that circumnavigates or breaches Nintendo’s technical protection. All of its website domains related to Yuzu must also be surrendered and taken down.
If you try and access Yuzu’s website now, a message pops up from Tropic Haze that explains the entire situation. An excerpt from the statement reads:
“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.”
“We have come to the decision that we cannot continue to allow this to occur,” said Tropic Haze. “Piracy was never our intention, and we believe that piracy of video games and on video game consoles should end.”
— yuzu (@yuzuemu) March 4, 2024
Effective immediately, the emulator’s creator is also discontinuing its Patreon accounts and Discord servers. Yuzu is no longer accessible online via its official website and any traces of it are quickly being wiped from the internet.
Source: Video Games Chronicle
