A sad day for emulation and open source advocates, and a reminder that Nintendo can and will destroy you if they see fit.
Hopefully their works will live in the saved repos just as ReVanced was able to live on after YouTube shut the original project down.
Yuzu gave them the opening to sue though. If they had been more circumspect - “Oh this is to develop homebrew / indie games nudge nudge” then maybe Nintendo wouldn’t have unleashed the lawyers or done so ineffectively. After all it wouldn’t be Yuzu’s fault if some wicked website corrupted their pure intentions by releasing device keys or patches that allowed their emulator run commercial games. But they were more blatant than that.
Also from an empathic perspective, of course Nintendo were going to sue. Yuzu should have known they would since that’s what console platforms do when something interferes with their profits. Yuzu is doubly bad since it interferes with hardware sales and game sales unlike custom firmware / cartridges which only affect game sales.
Of course the genie is already out of the bottle. Yuzu’s source code and binaries were on github for anyone to clone / fork. All the games are out in the wild. The piracy will carry on. I think it’s fair to say the NSP is effectively dead as a platform at this point. If a NSP2 turns up this year, as rumored, then I expect it will have revised anti-piracy measures and potentially a heavy online service aspect to go with it - it’s far easier to detect pirates and wield the banhammer when a device is online.
Yuzu knew, that’s why they made an LLC to eat the cost and to bankrupt
Smart people. I should learn how to do that.
I don’t really get people saying fuck Nintendo. It’s their IP, and Yuzu team was pretty blatant it’s made for piracy, boasting how good it works with TotK. It’s not what you do when you try to stay under the radar. Regarding Switch 2, this exactly what happened with DS and 3DS. DS was so easy to pirate Nintendo went ultra ham on piracy protection measures in 3DS, which took a good while to break. I’d expect the same with Switch 2.Which will probably make things annoying for people who will buy the system
Because a significant percent of people have always seen IP as theft and IP lawsuits as shakedowns. Real Talk - IP was codified to solve one problem (it wasn’t casual piracy, it was inventors being ripped off by evil businesses), and it made that problem worse. We should’ve just thrown it out from there and tried something else, but then the evil businesses convinced the soccer moms that their little Billy listening to Metallica on Napster was everything wrong with this country.
And people walked down the street smoking pot in my state before it was legalized. We still said “FUCK the war on drugs” when they got harassed by cops.
If their shit wasn’t so expensive and their games were released on PC, nobody would pirate it. Nintendo is shooting themselves on the foot then crying foul.
The switch is probably the cheapest mainstream gaming device. The games are expensive, granted. But they would definitely also be pirated on PC…
There’s a reason why Valve became an industry giant. Piracy is an issue of service, not price.