Yuzu & Citra devs fold to Nintendo's demands | Pay $2.3million to settle, take down github, domains, patreon, discord, with immediate effect.
Yuzu & Citra devs fold to Nintendo's demands | Pay $2.3million to settle, take down github, domains, patreon, discord, with immediate effect.
Yuzu - the popular Nintendo Switch Emulator (and recently Citra - a 3ds emulator developed by the same team as Yuzu) is dead. Nintendo has settled with Yuzu ...
A sad day for emulation and open source advocates, and a reminder that Nintendo can and will destroy you if they see fit.
Hopefully their works will live in the saved repos just as ReVanced was able to live on after YouTube shut the original project down.
It's a sad day. Fuck Nintendo.
Yuzu gave them the opening to sue though. If they had been more circumspect - "Oh this is to develop homebrew / indie games nudge nudge" then maybe Nintendo wouldn't have unleashed the lawyers or done so ineffectively. After all it wouldn't be Yuzu's fault if some wicked website corrupted their pure intentions by releasing device keys or patches that allowed their emulator run commercial games. But they were more blatant than that.
Also from an empathic perspective, of course Nintendo were going to sue. Yuzu should have known they would since that's what console platforms do when something interferes with their profits. Yuzu is doubly bad since it interferes with hardware sales and game sales unlike custom firmware / cartridges which only affect game sales.
Of course the genie is already out of the bottle. Yuzu's source code and binaries were on github for anyone to clone / fork. All the games are out in the wild. The piracy will carry on. I think it's fair to say the NSP is effectively dead as a platform at this point. If a NSP2 turns up this year, as rumored, then I expect it will have revised anti-piracy measures and potentially a heavy online service aspect to go with it - it's far easier to detect pirates and wield the banhammer when a device is online.
I don't really get people saying fuck Nintendo. It's their IP, and Yuzu team was pretty blatant it's made for piracy, boasting how good it works with TotK. It's not what you do when you try to stay under the radar. Regarding Switch 2, this exactly what happened with DS and 3DS. DS was so easy to pirate Nintendo went ultra ham on piracy protection measures in 3DS, which took a good while to break. I'd expect the same with Switch 2.Which will probably make things annoying for people who will buy the system
Each dev kit is $450. Being able to test on an emulator is free. Sure, you ultimately want to test on hardware, but indie dev teams aren't going to shell out that kind of money for each developer. Who gives a fuck about indie developers though, right?
True, but pretty sure you still need to license the Nintendo SDK to make a game that Nintendo will accept officially, so they'll still get money off you.You can use unofficial/open source SDKs for homebrew, thoughAh the SDK is free nvm
Fuck off Nintendo.
something something Streisand effect
Yup, the work of Yuzu isnt lost at all. It's just going to take time to see how that work will be advanced -- will Ryujinx absorb the developers and their knowledge or will Yuzu continue?
Yuzu’s unprecedented success was it’s downfall.
Their decision to profit off the project was their downfall.
It may have also been the fact that they linked to instruction on how to rip prod.keys and system firmwares. Also their instructions on enabling running copyrighted ROMs - despite the fact that Ripping game ROMs and firmware is not (unfortunately arguably, due to licencing models and jurisdiction - you will own nothing and like it.) illegal so long as it's for personal use.
They should've advertised it primarily as a testing and homebrew platform, and made sure not to make too much mention of the fact it can be used to play backups. Then they can at least play the ignorance card with more confidence.
Even then though, multi-billion yen company Nintendo probably would still pull this shit and drag, drag, drag the lawsuit out for forever and a day- draining lawyers fees of money. That being the case, settling is unfortunately the only option.
I do wonder if this is specifically what got them, would probably take a lemmy lawyer to unpack it, but I would have to imagine if they didn't have a patreon and basically a company, it would have been much harder for Nintendo to do anything about them. And I would also imagine in retrospect whatever money they got was not worth it when it ends like this.
I always assume when people operate services like this, that they host it in a country like Russia that's less likely to care about takedowns by western corpos and done anonymously as possible. Even though it's just an emulator, you would think they wouldn't be so brazen as to have a patreon which I'm sure requires someone's identity/billing info. They probably still could have been tracked down if they took crypto donations or something like that, but you would think that would be the first choice over putting a giant target on their backs. Patreon is obviously just gonna hand over whatever info they are asked to give when served a warrent, and so is Discord for that matter if they had any personal info on there too.
Hopefully, it wasn't the success of Yuzu but the fact it was being developed by an established company which was accepting over $30,000/mo in donations for "internal" builds.
It's a lot easier to pressure a company that you know has a bunch of income, is firmly established in a country that recognises US copyright law, and makes a lot of money particularly on a legally contested technology.
They've gone after Dolphin before, but that's still up and going. If Ryujinx or some other Yuzu rewrite (a soft fork would be v easy to take down imo) goes down then I'll be proven wrong here
or rather Nintendo's unprecedented greed
Here's a fork of Citra that can connect to the official nintendo network, still avilable now, by the person who made CTGP7 (custom tracks and characters in MarioKart 7), and here's the one for Yuzu. I think these are gonna be the main forks because they already have quite a lot of activity. It's cool that Citra and Yuzu were open-source so things like this can be made!
I hope the contributors are anonymous..
If they were anon, they wouldn't have folded. But the ethical thing to do now is for them to create new anon accounts, fork the repo, and keep doing the good work
I think at least for Yuzu it would be better for devs to rebrand it to keep ninty back a bit.
Where'd they get 2.3 million from?
Someone else mentioned in a comment that the LLC behind Yuzu may file for bankruptcy to avoid paying Nintendo anything
Tbh I think they were smart to incorporate. It might have drawn a larger target on their backs (though patreon's target probably dwarfed it), but it also meant that individually they were financially protected from Nintendo. They'll probably still have to pay Nintendo whatever their corporation currently has even if they declare bankruptcy, but at least the devs aren't having their wages garnished until the end of time.
If they do attempt to declare bankruptcy, let's hope Nintendo doesn't try and sue them again to pierce the corporate veil.
Nintendo has too much money anyways
Patreon?
Likely not even close to that amount.
Greed.
xD
Wait I didn't get it yet.... Anyone theoretically know of another who knows another who may be able to send me a file related to or unrelated to the given subject?
The Internet Archive's got your back. As if you needed a reason to donate to them.
Theoretically this exists: https://github.com/Nikilites/nuzu
Also, I managed to install the Flatpak of Yuzu off FlatHub about a half hour ago.
The release downloads work, but I don't expect a long future for that project. The creator publicly posted his country of residence on Reddit, and doesn't have much of a plan to avoid a lawsuit other than "we'll condemn piracy wherever we can."
On top of that, it has a brand-new Patreon and is missing the source code for core parts of the emulator.
Citra has a core on retroarch, I am hoping that it will stay up
My already-installed copy of these softwares won't go anywhere, Nintendo. Get bent.
More people would purchase the games if they weren't 60€ MSRP each regardless of size and quality.
I used to emulate switch games to test them as a free trial first, then I would buy them in second hand for half the price (which is still a lot, 30€ for a nintendo game versus 14€ for Nichijou volume)
And regardless of age! Their games never go on sale. And they don't use local pricing (the actual term escapes me rn), so us poors in the 3rd world are stuck paying half a months salary for 7 year old games 🤪
regional pricing is the phrase you are looking for friend!
So who is gonna create an anonymous account and fork the repo and website?
Fuck shitendo. Their games are shit anyway. 🖕🏽
Running their mouths on Discord. Using Patreon to profit from (not) piracy (but everyone knows it is). Reckless display of hubris.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=gIv0AuKe01A
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Good bot
This fiasco demonstrates why open source is the superior software model.
Quite reasonable. They don’t want to giveaway stuff free
I mean, you're right. I don't agree with the emulators being taken down, it sucks, but it's hardly surprising that Nintendo, a company known for strictly protecting their copyrights, would go after these projects.
Hopefully other people and projects can pick up the reins, but should always be ready and prepared for another strike like this.
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