The lawsuit by Nintendo against Tropic Haze has come to an end and has bitter consequences for the popular Switch emulator.
For the provider of the Switch emulator Yuzu, things haven't been looking too well recently. Nintendo had sued Tropic Haze because, according to them, Tropic Haze's emulator Yuzu encouraged users to "unlawfully play pirated video games that were published only for a specific console." The companies have now agreed to settle the case, with severe consequences not just for Tropic Haze's switch emulator.
Tropic Haze's Yuzu Is Now History
It was a short but painful lawsuit for the company behind the popular Switch emulator. The court found that Yuzu was "primarily designed to circumvent and play Nintendo Switch games" and has prohibited its creator from further involvement in the emulator and its distribution. However, this was just the beginning.
Tropic Haze now has to pay $2.4 million in damages to Nintendo and transfer the online domain "yuzu-emu.org" to the video game giant. Additionally, all media presence of the emulator, including all social media channels and the Discord server, is to be wiped out.
Before that finally happens, Yuzu took to Twitter/X one last time with a message to the fans.
— yuzu (@yuzuemu) March 4, 2024
In case this message gets lost, we have it here again for you.
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.
The message reveals that it's not only the Switch emulator Yuzu, but 3DS emulator Citra as well that is affected by the shutdown, as Tropic Haze is now prohibited from working on any projects related to Nintendo content.
With this, Nintendo has won another battle against developers and distributors of emulators and ROMs. In 2021, the ROM-hosting website RomUniverse was already ordered to pay damages of $2.1 million. In 2018, the Japanese gaming company bagged a hefty $12 million after suing the ROM hosting websites LoveRETRO and LoveROMs.
What do you think about this legal action by Nintendo? Do you find it justified?