Nintendo Just Wiped Yuzu and Citra Emulators Off the Map

Following close on the heels of Nintendo of America’s intimidating lawsuit against the makers of the Yuzu emulation software, the parties have reached a settlement that could change the face of modern console emulation.

Yuzu’s developers, Tropic Haze LLC, has shut down all operations and agreed to pay Nintendo $2.4 million. This is in compensation for Nintendo’s claims about the Switch emulator’s impact on the market and the sale of its games.

“[Y]uzu and its team have always been against piracy,” the group said in a statement posted to its website. “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.”

Tropic Haze has closed the project’s website and github code repositories, its Patreon account and Discord server and, in a surprise twist, they’ve also taken down the popular Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra — another major blow to the emulation scene. That’s because the Yuzu project leads were also leads on Citra, and of course they wouldn’t want to press their luck after a $2.4 million settlement.

Here is the full statement from Yuzu’s developers:

Nintendo’s suit highlighted The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in particular, stating that after the game leaked ahead of its May 2023 launch it was downloaded more than 1 million times. While Yuzu itself was not responsible for Nintendo’s leak, the company claimed that the emulator’s availability itself encouraged piracy “on a colossal scale.”

Nintendo pointed to piracy sites and the Switch piracy subreddit, where users commonly pointed to Yuzu for playing game files acquired illegally. But were Yuzu’s devs profiting off their work? While Yuzu was freely distributed, Nintendo also pointed to the company’s Patreon — alleging (evidently based on patron count) that Tropic Haze was pulling in around $30,000 monthly from supporters of their development efforts.

Many in the emulation community hoped that Yuzu might have the resources and the willpower to fight the lawsuit in court. But the settlement announcement came within just days.

Some have speculated that one deciding factor might have been the availability of Tears of the Kingdom-specific performance patches, which were available to paying members of Yuzu’s Patreon as part of the nightly build. Not only were these patches effectively locked behind a paywall, but if Nintendo could show that they were available prior to the game’s launch date then the case against Yuzu would be a whole lot stronger.

So, overnight, both Yuzu and Citra are gone.

While this is a major win for Nintendo — which has erroneously claimed that all emulation is piracy by nature — there is also a silver lining for emulation fans. First, a quick settlement out of court means that this case will not result in any new legal precedent set against emulation in general. Some onlookers worried that, should Nintendo prevail in demonstrating in court that the Yuzu software violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing the Switch’s encryption systems to run games, it might have a much larger impact on the legality of console emulation in the west.

While copyright laws in Japan are stricter, emulation today remains something of a gray area in the United States and other western countries. That’s thanks in large part to a series of legal victories in the 1990s, where courts recognized the consumer’s right to make and possess legal backups of software products. Emulators too have succeeded in court where their makers have shown that the original manufacturer’s code was not copied but instead reverse-engineered and rebuilt from the ground up as an original software package.

As for Switch emulation in 2024, the closure of Android emulator Skyline in 2023 leaves just one major player standing: Ryujinx, which is still in active development but currently has lower games compatibility than Yuzu managed to achieve. A new Switch emulation project, Strato, is in its early stages and has not seen a public release yet. (UPDATE: One of Strato’s lead developers, Lynx, has since announced his departure from the project.)

Forks of Citra are also still alive, for now.

And while the Tropic Haze developers won’t have any further involvement, Yuzu was also an open-source development project. Both in its use license and the availability of its code, other developers can fork the project and continue where Yuzu left off … should they wish to dance with Nintendo’s lawyers down the line.