A case filed in Rhode Island court on Monday says that Nintendo is suing the people who made Yuzu, an open-source Nintendo Switch simulator. Stephen Totilo, a writer for Game File, was the first to report on the suit. Here is everything you need to know about the case Nintendo put in place against the Switch emulator Yuzu!!
Nintendo Lawsuit Against Switch Emulator Yuzu
Tropic Haze, the company that makes Yuzu, was sued in a 41-page long lawsuit. Nintendo also talks about a person going by the name Bunnei who is in charge of making Yuzu. Yuzu is a free emulator that came out in 2018, a few months after the Nintendo Switch. This one was made by the same people who made Citra, an emulator for the Nintendo 3DS.
It’s a piece of software that lets people play Nintendo Switch games on Linux, Android, and Windows PCs. While playing games on emulators is prohibited, emulators themselves are not inherently unlawful. Apple, on the other hand, said in its case that Yuzu can’t be used legally.
Check out the official tweet below:
Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against popular Switch emulator Yuzu pic.twitter.com/p26i3Q7tig
— Dexerto (@Dexerto) February 28, 2024
According to Nintendo, Yuzu runs codes that “defeat” Nintendo’s security measures, such as decoding using “an illegally obtained copy of prod.keys.”
Nintendo wrote in the case, “In other words, without Yuzu’s decryption of Nintendo’s encryption, illegal copies of games could not be played on PCs or Android devices.” Nintendo said that the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was proof of the harm that Yuzu was said to have caused. Tears of the Kingdom was leaked almost two weeks before it came out on May 12.
Nintendo said that the illegal version of the game was downloaded more than a million times before Tears of the Kingdom came out. Apple said that more than 20% of download links led people to Yuzu, which was used to play the game.
Nintendo kept saying that most ROM sites send people to Yuzu to play the games they’ve gotten, even though Yuzu doesn’t give out stolen copies of games. Nintendo said it “spent a lot of time and money” to stop people from illegally copying, marketing, selling, and distributing its Nintendo Switch games.
On its Patreon page, Yuzu says that more than 7,000 people give the team $30,000. Nintendo said that paid Yuzu downloads have brought in at least $50,000 for the company. Nintendo said Yuzu’s Patreon had twice as many paid members between May 1 and May 12, when Tears of the Kingdom came out.
Nintendo wants the court to shut down the emulator and give them money for their losses. The distributor of Tears of the Kingdom is known for being very strict with its intellectual property. Nintendo has won several cases against sites that pirate games, including RomUniverse, and was given more than $2 million in damages in one case.
Nintendo also went after Gary Bowser, who was said to have hacked the Nintendo Switch. Bowser was caught and charged with selling hacks for the Switch. Despite his release from prison, Bowser still owes Nintendo $10 million; during his incarceration, he paid Nintendo $175 using proceeds from his labor in the prison kitchen and library.
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For more information about the cases that have been made against other big companies, please visit our website, readablevibes.com.