Today we learn that Nintendo and Tropic Haze, the creators of the popular free Switch emulator Yuzu, have agreed to settle out of court following the recent lawsuit filed by the house of Mario and Zelda.
The settlement still has to be approved by the court, but it demands that Tropic Haze concedes defeat and pays Nintendo $2.4 million in damages.
Tropic Haze also agrees to a permanent injunction that basically forces it to shut down its business and the emulator.
The proposed order is basically a full-fledged surrender by Tropic Haze to Nintendo's legal bullying. The company won't be able to continue developing Yuzu or distributing it in any way and has to destroy all software related to the emulator and hand over to Nintendo all hardware used to circumvent Nintendo's intellectual property.
Tropical Haze also has to hand over to Nintendo the domain of its website and surrender control of all websites or systems used to distribute Yuzu.
Below you can read a statement by Tropic Haze made on X (formerly Twitter).
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.
While this pretty much marks the end of Yuzu in its current form, its nature as a settlement likely won't create a legal precedent against emulation.
On the other hand, Yuzu is open source, which means that its source code is likely already in the hands of hundreds if not thousands of people, so it's very unlikely that this is the last we hear about it.
Nintendo argued that the emulator facilitated piracy, and was instrumental in the ability of many to download and play illegal pre-release copies of games.
According to the original lawsuit, one million copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom were downloaded before it launched, while another million downloads were attempted. During that time, the number of supporters on Yuzu's Patreon doubled.
Recently, Nintendo announced that 139.36 million units of the Switch have been shipped by December 31, 2023, on top of 1.2 billion copies of its games. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom has shipped 20.28 million units worldwide by the same date.
