It’s finally game over for Yuzu after the company responsible for the illegal Switch emulator conceded in court today (Monday, 4 March) over a dispute with Nintendo.
Tropic Haze, the company that created Yuzu, has been at the center of a very public case involving some of Nintendo’s flagship console games.
The culmination of this legal battle, which both parties agreed, will be $2.4 million in damages paid to Japan’s biggest console operator.
What is Yuzu?
Yuzu is “an open-source project that lets you play Switch games on your PC or mobile device. It supports many popular titles, such as Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda, Pokemon Sword, and more,” according to the site’s description.
The “open-source” project however was taking licensed Nintendo games a week before their release like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and seeing them downloaded over 1 million times on the emulator. Nintendo was set on the warpath and wanted the emulator to cease.
As we reported last week, Yuzu was “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale” according to the original case that was filed late February in the United States District Court of Rhode Island.
Nintendo settles for destruction
In the case closure, documents found that “Yuzu executes code that decrypts Nintendo Switch video games (including component files) immediately before and during run time using unauthorized copies of the Nintendo Switch cryptographic keys. Yuzu is primarily designed to circumvent and play Nintendo Switch games.”
Today, the court saw Tropic Haze bend the knee to Nintendo and agree to not only a substantial fee but also the destruction of all materials pertaining to the emulator.
The court resolution called for the “destruction by deletion of all circumvention devices, including all copies of Yuzu, all circumvention tools used for developing or using Yuzu—such as TegraRcmGUI, Hekate, Atmosphère, Lockpick_RCM, NDDumpTool, nxDumpFuse, and TegraExplorer, and all copies of Nintendo cryptographic keys including the prod.keys, and all other electronic material within Defendant or its members’ custody, possession, or control that violate Nintendo’s rights under the DMCA or infringe copyrights owned or exclusively licensed by Nintendo.”
Nintendo also received the domain of Yuzu and all related materials in the closure of the case. Marking the end of Yuzu and all the related information that Tropic Haze had on the emulator. This also marks a substantial win for the console giant against piracy and sets a precedent for any other emulators that may adopt a similar approach.
Image credit: Photo by Juan Jimenez; Pexels
