Nintendo has filed a civil lawsuit against creators of the popular free Switch emulator Yuzu Tropic Haze with the US District Coury of Rhode Island in an attempt to shut down a major player in the emulation of its aging console.
As reported by Stephen Totilo, the lawsuit seeks damages and the closure of the project, which allows gamers to enjoy Nintendo games on PC, often with a significant gain in resolution and overall image quality.
The creators of Yuzu are accused of circumventing Nintendo's encryption technology and facilitating piracy.
The lawsuit goes to some length in alleging the link between Yuzu and piracy, going as far as mentioning that the emulator is used to play pirated copies of pre-release games.
An example brought by the Kyoto-based company alleges that one million copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom were downloaded before its release, while another million downloads were attempted. While that happened, Yuzu's Patreon supporters doubled.
The company also alleges that even "harmed law-abiding Nintendo customers" are harmed by this, as they have to dodge spoilers on social media.
It's worth mentioning that while Tropic Haze provides the emulation software, they do not directly distribute Nintendo's copyrighted software, including the ROMs of the games or the encryption keys required for the emulator to work. This has been for a long time the main line of defense for developers of a variety of emulators.
It remains to be seen whether Nintendo's arguments will find purchase with the court and whether Tropic Haze even has the resources to face the much larger corporation in a legal battle.
That being said, Yuzu is open-source. This means that even a victory for Nintendo would quite possibly do little to stop the emulator's distribution and continued development.
A few days ago, we learned that 139.36 million units of the Nintendo Switch have been shipped by December 31, 2023, on top of 1.2 billion copies of software for the console. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom has shipped 20.28 million copies.
