After Nintendo recently filed a lawsuit against the Yuzu team, it was pretty much inevitable this was going to happen wasn't it. The end of Yuzu is officially here.
Nintendo and Tropic Haze LLC (Yuzu) filed a joint motion for the court to enter Final Judgment and Permanent Injunction, so as I understand it's not quite final until the judge stamps it.
As a result the Yuzu team have announced their intention to shut everything down, and have agreed to pay Nintendo $2.4M USD in damages. As per the other document, Yuzu will also transfer the domain name used over to Nintendo and they have agreed to delete every single thing related to Yuzu that they have.
Writing in the yuzu Discord (and posted on X) the developer bunnei said:
Hello yuz-ers and Citra fans:
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 prior to its release and ruin the experience for legitimate purchasers and fans.
We have come to the decision that we cannot continue to allow this to occur. Piracy was never our intention, and we believe that piracy of video games and on video game consoles should end. Effective today, we will be pulling our code repositories offline, discontinuing our Patreon accounts and Discord servers, and, soon, shutting down our websites. We hope our actions will be a small step toward ending piracy of all creators’ works.
Thank you for your years of support and for understanding our decision.
Update 05/03/24: While "support of Citra" was a bit ambiguous, it's now confirmed Citra is also gone. The website is down and replaced with the statement, the GitHub is also gone.
Considering it's open source though, and has been out in the wild for some time now, it's unlikely this is truly the end because it's been so widely circulated. However, it will make it a lot harder for anyone seeking it out, and no doubt put off anyone from doing anything with Yuzu code they might still have.
For now, the Ryujinx project at least still exists and as far as I know hasn't had Nintendo come knocking — yet.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Last edited by ToddL on 5 March 2024 at 5:33 am UTC
redneckdrow Mar 5
The way they went after Yuzu was by arguing that it is not just an emulator, that it is a tool used primarily for piracy. Because they're still selling the Switch. Cracking encryption on proprietary hardware that is still on the market is legally dubious at best. I believe Nintendo to be incorrect in assuming that the majority pirated games, but the burden of proof against that would be too great, even in civil court.
Just look at what happened to the guy that cracked the Switch firmware in the first place. Modern Vintage Gamer did a whole video series about why he gives the emulation community a bad name.
Things like this are why I only use emulators for discontinued platforms. In that case, it's much harder for a company to say that it affects their bottom line.
Ripping my own cartridges requires a lot of pain on my part (there are a few different pi-based solutions that lessen that pain today), but it's better than risking a $500,000 dollar fine or five years in prison. Ripping floppies or discs is considerably easier in most cases. I tend to use cdrdao or ddrescue.
Outright piracy of a game still commercially available is theft, no matter how you slice it. Backing up your existing games for a discontinued platform isn't.
I have a couple of 90's-00s games that would be expensive as heck to replace, so I keep the physical copies locked up in a fire-resistant safe and play them via emulation.
If you're interested in Sony v. Bleem, Gaming Historian did a video on the whole debacle. Bleem may have run like a piece of garbage, but every emulation project today owes it a debt.
Quoting: cozBusinesses have been created around protecting game developers against Switch emulation. You don't pay someone to protect you unless you expect to lose sales, which makes obvious that harm has been done.
Say what now? If you think you will lose sales on other platforms, then you make your game available on those platforms, you don't pay for some protection racket. That sounds pretty Mafia?
Quoting: GuestMoreover, I am skeptical of the "pro-consumer claims" that people have of the EU. I heard that some crack scene groups got sent to prison in Germany for tampering with Denuvo, if anything thats anticonsumerYou surely can provide a source about the Denuvo case?
Besides: Pro-consumer doesn't mean anything goes. Everything is based in the current laws.
Linux_Rocks Mar 5
Mar 5
Quoting: redneckdrowThe thing is, I don't think Nintendo was going after it as an emulator. Sony v. Bleem (a PSX emulator) set a precedent ~24 years ago. Emulation of older systems is not only permissible, it's vital. Even the IRS uses emulators of 60's-era computers, such as the Martinsburg Monster, that still accept their wildly out-of-date programs written mostly in COBOL.
The way they went after Yuzu was by arguing that it is not just an emulator, that it is a tool used primarily for piracy. Because they're still selling the Switch. Cracking encryption on proprietary hardware that is still on the market is legally dubious at best. I believe Nintendo to be incorrect in assuming that the majority pirated games, but the burden of proof against that would be too great, even in civil court.
Just look at what happened to the guy that cracked the Switch firmware in the first place. Modern Vintage Gamer did a whole video series about why he gives the emulation community a bad name.
Things like this are why I only use emulators for discontinued platforms. In that case, it's much harder for a company to say that it affects their bottom line.
Ripping my own cartridges requires a lot of pain on my part (there are a few different pi-based solutions that lessen that pain today), but it's better than risking a $500,000 dollar fine or five years in prison. Ripping floppies or discs is considerably easier in most cases. I tend to use cdrdao or ddrescue.
Outright piracy of a game still commercially available is theft, no matter how you slice it. Backing up your existing games for a discontinued platform isn't.
I have a couple of 90's-00s games that would be expensive as heck to replace, so I keep the physical copies locked up in a fire-resistant safe and play them via emulation.
If you're interested in Sony v. Bleem, Gaming Historian did a video on the whole debacle. Bleem may have run like a piece of garbage, but every emulation project today owes it a debt.
Manufacturing of Nintendo 3DS stopped over 4 years ago. After last year the Nintendo eShop is completely shut down so even customers who have original hardware cannot purchase digital games. So Nintendo makes no money from neither hardware nor software but they still went after Citra. This is a serious blow to game preservation.
Last edited by Brokatt on 5 March 2024 at 8:06 am UTC
Quoting: Purple Library Guyin a case like this it doesn't really matter if you would win the case in the courtsI looked it up, and it does seem in the USA even if you're sued in bad faith it's still hard to recoup expenses
That being said it does seem the devs made quite a bit through Patreon. The internet archive shows they earned about $28,970 per month, and it seems they were active for around six years. So assuming they actually ended up getting as an average half of that through the years, they made around one million in six years through Patreon. Then again, it seems they used to have Citra on the Android app store for $4.99 too, and Citra started on 2014. It sounds like they basically are paying around the same amount they earned
For me regarding if this is just or not, it comes down if they would be harbored in fair use. The nature of the copyrighted material, software which is only partially opaque, actually has been considered to have less copyright protections than usual but still against Yuzu because of the commercial nature. As the copyright holders of the emulator itself are the Yuzu team that's something Nintendo can't use against Yuzu. Character of use, emulation, also goes in favor of Yuzu. However the final criteria, effect on the market, is definitely against Yuzu. So there's at least two criteria against Yuzu. More criteria could be added if relevant, but it's not routinely done.
I feel that Yuzu is not fair use because of the effect on the market, more than the commercial nature of the project... but that's not the case for Citra. It's not the same to make an emulator for a console that's not being manufactured anymore. Then again, only a trial would say this for sure.
soulsource Mar 5
Quoting: Purple Library Guyhost it in some place like the EU and have some kind of region lock where they don't allow downloads from places with DMCA-type anti-digital-lock-tampering lawsI don't know about the rest of Europe, but at least here in Austria we have a similar rule. However, typically Austrian, it leaves a loophole, as here it is only illegal to circumvent an "effective copy protection" - and how effective can it be, if it can be circumvented? (IANAL)
Quoting: redneckdrowOutright piracy of a game still commercially available is theft, no matter how you slice it.
Legally it is, yeah. But ethically... maybe?
In case you download something you'd have bought otherwise, or sell copies of someone else's property, sure it's theft. However, if you weren't going to pay for it anyway, then what? How can it be theft if nobody loses anything? Or if it actually has the effect of increasing sales, as shown by the famous EU studies on the subject of piracy. But never mind, this topic has been discussed to death already.
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