Switch emulation: Yuzu fork Suyu remains available on private git after DMCA takedown, & Nintendo now owns the yuzu website
Following the demise of Nintendo Switch emulator “Yuzu”, a bunch of clones have surfaced left and right. One of the most promising (or, at least, organized) ones is Suyu. Right as the Yuzu clone announced their 0.0.2 beta release however, their source code was taken down from Gitlab, allegedly because of a DMCA claim (which might or might not have been a troll). However, Suyu is still available via the developers’ private hosting, and the developers are looking into reinstating their gitlab repository.
In the meantime, Nintendo now officially own yuzu-emu.org
Nintendo Takes ownership of yuzu-emu.org
A bunch of scene websites have reported on this already, Nintendo are pushing through with the dismantling of Yuzu emulator and its associated entities. Earlier this week, it was confirmed that yuzu-emu.org, formerly the official url of the Yuzu emulator website, now belongs to Nintendo:
Yuzu and its clones
While Nintendo are busy cutting one of the hydra’s heads, the scene is hard at work to keep Switch emulation going.
Suyu is one of the many clones of now-dead Switch emulator Yuzu. As a way to thwart potential legal threats, Suyu claims to be free forever (by opposition to Yuzu’s patreon model), and puts emphasis on not helping users actually run pirated games (the Yuzu wiki and discord server were full of information and guides on how to obtain Switch decryption keys).
As always, I’m no lawyer, but many devs on the scene have called out that since Suyu is based on Yuzu, it is doomed from the start: tt risks being taken down from any “high profile” source control platform such as Gitlab or github, because it is in essence a fork of a project that has already been DMCA’ed there.
Case in point, it apparently only took a quickly crafted DMCA claim for gitlab to lock the repository.
It is currently unclear if that DMCA was actually initiated by Nintendo’s lawyers, or is just a troll attack. The “most” official and recent statement I could find is from Sharpie, admin of the Suyu discord, which states it is still unclear if the DMCA is legit or fake:
In the meantime, Suyu is still available on a private hosted git repo as well as private download servers, at https://suyu.dev/
Nows a great opportunity to take advantage of p2p git alternatives.
Git IS p2p. You don’t have to use a central server with git. You can clone it from anyone that allows you access.
Damn they literally got owned
I’ll start my own switch elimination and call it Snip Snap
why doesn’t oneof these producers just locate themselves in a country that doesn’t give a you-know-what about copyright infringement? Like Russia, or China, or Korea, or the middle east, or…?
But yuzu did require you to dump your own keys and firmware? How is this different in any way? *** Nintendo tho.
Disable auto updates on Yuzu. Since nintendo own the website, auto updates will now announce your IP to them.