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PayPalAfter 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.
pleasereadthemanual Mar 5
Quoting: cozThat 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.If you're interested in lifetime earnings: https://graphtreon.com/creator/yuzuteam
Quoting: tuubiLegally it is, yeah. But ethically... maybe?Wouldn't this argument legitimate all open source license violations?
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.
Nobody would pay for it anyway. True
Nobody loses anything. True
Has a positive effect on sales? It's not sold in the first place. But it gets used more.
Quoting: Guesthttps://www.gamesindustry.biz/denuvo-investigation-reportedly-leads-to-arrest-for-games-pirate-voksiSince the article is behind a paywall: Does it contain any other content than this article? https://www.pcgamer.com/denuvo-sues-voski-the-pirate-who-helped-crack-it/
Since the latter doesn't contain any outcome, just that the cracker was in fact not arrested & would probably face charges.
ExpandingMan Mar 5
Quoting: cozThere's no unfairness or injustice here. Nintendo does have deep pockets and throws its weight around but in this case there was no abuse. Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls reverse engineering protection systems "legally risky". Businesses 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.
The monopolist nintendo might lose some sales to people that make a bit of money by reverse engineering nintendo's product, using their own time and effort and expertise, in order to free users from the hardware prison that nintendo feels is necessary maximize its profits. Then, nintendo uses the state and courts as useful idiots to enforce their hardware-prison business model at gunpoint.
Quoting: BrokattManufacturing 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.You know why I think this is, and what I think's going to happen?
My guess is that they went after Yuzu now because, if current reports and suggestions from parts-manufacturers are to be believed, the Switch's successor will be revealed sometime within the next year, and will use an SoC in the same Nvidia family as the current hardware uses - had Yuzu continued, we'd probably have seen day-one emulation of it (same as happened with the Game Boy Advance).
I reckon they've gone after Citra as well, and will go after Dolphin again next, because they'll be adding GameCube, Wii, and 3DS games to their online subscription service as part of the hype-cycle for the "Switch 2". (Even though, as always, it'll be a teeny-tiny drip-feed that doesn't even come close to covering what was actually available for all of those machines.)
Last edited by Pengling on 5 March 2024 at 3:17 pm UTC
Quoting: LachuI do not known English well, so I do not understood everything. As I understood, they emulator allows to play games outside authorized (by Nintendo!) hardware. But, I do not seen anything related to piracy. They mention users use they emulator to piracy, but how? By playing games on PC? Perhaps, Nintendo should not have rights to restrict this. I only reminder, that British government, many years ago, discovered they cannot opens document created in old Office Suite. They decided to switch to OpenOffice, so MS decided to "standardize" (pheff) OOXML. What about case, when you cannot longer play "your" games, because your hardware were broken and cannot buy new?
Parts in the DMCA prohibits sale, distribution and manufacturing of software or hardware that circumvents digital protections. So the issue here is that the emulator circumvented Nintendo's DRM that they use to sell licenses for to for companies to allow them to release software for the platform. And this circumventium is more than "ignore to check", it involves using the encryption keys built into the Switch itself.
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