Nintendo are suing the developers of the Yuzu Switch emulator

There’s no question that Yuzu is one of the best emulators out there. Nintendo apparently agree, and are suing its developers (specifically, Tropic Haze, the company that owns Yuzu. Developer Bunnei is also explicitly named several times in the document), stating that Yuzu “facilitates piracy at a colossal scale“. The lawsuit argues that the Yuzu developers are significantly responsible for the use of their emulator in illegal ways, in part because of how they acknowledge the need for the “prod.keys” files, how their “Quickstart guide” is structured, and through the linked success of their Patron campaign with waves of piracy.

In a specific example, Nintendo’s lawsuit notes that Zelda Tears of the Kingdom was downloaded 1 million times following the leak and prior to game’s release, and claims Yuzu’s Patreon income practically doubled during that period. This allows Nintendo’s lawyers to quickly jump to the conclusion that Yuzu’s business model is directly linked to piracy.

Totk running in Yuzu

Yuzu’s Patreon account currently has over 7,000 patrons and, according to the Yuzu Patreon page, earns Defendant and its developers approximately $30,000 a month. Since the publication of the Android version of Yuzu on Google Play on May 30, 2023, the free version has been downloaded over 1 million times and the paid version has been downloaded over 10,000 times, earning Defendant at least an additional $50,000 plus. […]

Notably, between May 1 and May 12, membership on the Yuzu Patreon, which provides paid members more updated “early access” builds of Yuzu, doubled. On information and belief, thousands of additional paid members of Yuzu’s Patreon signed up so that they could download the early access build and play unlawful copies of Zelda: TotK. On information and belief, Defendant and its agents were fully aware that the reason membership of the Patreon exploded was that Yuzu was being used for unlawful play of pirated copies of Zelda: TotK.

Generally speaking, emulators are not illegal in the US afaik (disclaimer: not a lawyer). However the devil’s in the details, and Nintendo seem to point their attack with the fact that Yuzu isn’t “simply” an emulator, but a tool that breaks encryption of Nintendo’s games. While Yuzu doesn’t ship with any of the decryption keys, it does have code that mimics the Switch Firmware and uses those keys to decrypt games. Whether not providing these keys is enough to justify “not” being a circumvention device, will be what’s being debated here in my opinion. Yuzu is certainly not a “full fledged circumvention device”, but there might be enough in there to consider it a key component.

The fact that the Switch is a current gen (*cough*) console doesn’t make it easy on Yuzu’s developers: the Nintendo Switch is easy to find in stores, and that thwarts a lot of the typical justifications related to game preservation for emulators: it is very easy to play most Switch games on the dedicated hardware, that hardware isn’t hard to find.

Nintendo do point that they have won judgements in the past against other circumvention devices, but the examples they name, including against infamous team Xecuter, are much more clear cut examples of devices that were actually created for end-to-end circumvention and piracy.

From the lawsuit’s preliminary statement:

With Yuzu in hand, nothing stops a user from obtaining and playing unlawful copies of virtually any game made for the Nintendo Switch, all without paying a dime to Nintendo or to any of the hundreds of other game developers and publishers making and selling games for the Nintendo Switch. In effect, Yuzu turns general computing devices into tools for massive intellectual property infringement of Nintendo and others’ copyrighted works.

The full lawsuit document can be found here.

Source: initially reported by Stephen Totilo, thanks to @RomeoMafia for the tip!