Yuzu Creators Will Pay Nintendo $2.4 Million in Damages and End Development of Switch Emulator

The creators of Yuzu have settled its lawsuit with Nintendo, agreeing to pay $2.4 million in damages and shutting down support for the popular open-source Switch emulator.

A new document reveals that Tropic Haze will pay Nintendo $2.4 million to settle the lawsuit filed last week. Nintendo sued Yuzu’s developers in U.S. Federal Court, alleging that the emulator is “primarily designed” to circumvent several layers of Switch encryption in order to make it possible to play Nintendo games on devices such as Steam Deck.

Nintendo argued in its filing that Tropic Haze was liable for the distribution of illegal copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, claiming that it had been pirated up to 1 million times before release. Specifically, the filing claimed that Yuzu’s Patreon page allowed its developers to earn $30,000 per month by providing subscribers with “daily updates,” “early access,” and “special unreleased features” to games like Tears of the Kingdom.

Yuzu is shutting down

In a proposed final judgment and permanent injunction document, the settlement terms will forbid the distribution of Yuzu in all of its forms while shutting down its website and other services. Citra, a Nintendo 3DS emulator, will also be discontinued.

As Nintendo previously noted in its legal complaint last week, it not only wanted monetary damages from the lawsuit but also wanted to eliminate Yuzu’s existence entirely, including taking control of its domain and social media accounts.

[yuzu]

yuzu, in its current form, will cease to exist.

Their settlement with Nintendo prohibits any distribution of yuzu in built and source code form. Development must also stop.

The yuzu website and related services will also be shut down.https://t.co/INBkXCf38d pic.twitter.com/rMeKeRCeFv

— OatmealDome (@OatmealDome) March 4, 2024

Yuzu’s creators confirmed the decision and wrote the following message in its Discord.

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.

First released in 2018, Yuzu is an open-source Nintendo Switch emulator developed using C++. It has been used to emulate numerous Nintendo Switch games shortly after release. The topic of hardware emulation remains fraught, with some game preservation experts advocating for the emulation of older platforms that have been discontinued. The Switch, for its part, is expected to remain Nintendo’s main platform until at least 2025 and has suffered a notable piracy platform for much of its existence.

This is not the first time Nintendo has sought legal action against emulation developers. Most recently, in 2021, the ROM-hosting website called RomUniverse was ordered to pay Nintendo $2.1 million in damages for copyright infringement and federal trademark infringement. In 2018, Nintendo received over $12 million in damages after successfully suing the ROM-hosted websites LoveRETRO and LoveROMs.

Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.