Last week, Nintendo filed a lawsuit against Tropical Haze, the company that develops the Switch emulator Yuzu. Or rather developed. On Monday, the developers announced that they have reached a settlement with Nintendo that means they will stop development with immediate effect and pay $2.4 million in damages to the Japanese gaming giant, reports The Verge.
Yuzu’s website is closed and the open source on Github has been removed. The Android version has been removed from the Play Store and Yuzu’s Discord server is closed to new posts.
But since Yuzu was open source with GPL license and the project had been cloned by hundreds of developers and thousands of curious, neither Nintendo nor the original developers can stop clones. Several new projects have already appeared that intend to continue the development of the emulator. Two examples that WCCF Tech have found is I had and juice (“sue you”). The former is on Github while the latter has chosen Gitlab to avoid the risk of Github shutting down the project following pressure from Nintendo.
Emulation in general is not illegal in the US or most other countries, but Nintendo felt that Yuzu in particular encouraged and facilitated piracy.
