I'm confused as to how or why the Yuzu team would be held liable for this. Is it their responsibility to ensure that people don't donate money to them if the timing of that donation coincides with an unrelated leak of Nintendo's IP? If emulation is allowed and the Yuzu team itself isn't engaging in the promotion of piracy, I don't see what the case is here.
At the time Zelda leaked, it didn't work correctly in the release version of Yuzu. The lawsuit claims that the Yuzu team released a patched version that fixed the issue before the game's official retail launch date, but they have some sort of exclusivity period (looks like one week as far as I can tell) where new releases are exclusive to their Patreon before they become freely available. Nintendo is arguing that the large boost in Patreon subscribers was due to people wanting to get access to the patch so they could play Zelda early.
I think this would be a big issue for them if they specifically marketed it as "the Zelda fix" or insinuated that the only purpose of that update was to make this leaked game playable. Otherwise, they could just say that updates address the dissimilarities between the Switch hardware and the emulator. How can Nintendo prove ill intent here?
They (publicly) blocked discussion of TOTK fixes until the game's release day, but that's still 0th hour and any build to include the fix would have been early access for whatever the ea period is: https://github.com/yuzu-emu/yuzu/issues/10226#issuecomment-1...
That's an interesting argument, but I'm not sure it'll hold water with the judge unless they can't show such arrangements are very common with donation-funded software and was in place well before this leak, e.g. yes, we made money off this leak, but not because we designed the model to profit off people wanting to pirate/cause loss of sales, it's just how this has always worked.
We'll see. I'm not really sure there's anything they could have done better in that case as a positive defense if they had this in mind, though - like, releasing it not behind a timegate paywall could be an argument for actively destroy game sales even more, by that logic, and actively waiting until post-launch to release it could be argued to be around trying to extract more money from people to focus on it more.
Ouch, releasing patch before official launch sort of proves they pirated the game themselves, which somewhat undermines defense that they don't encourage piracy.
Not necessarily. I don't know the context, but bugs/issues reported from users may have been sufficient to patch their code without touching the ROM themselves.
If you read their writeup about fixing the game, the issues appear to stem from it heavily using a texture format that most GPUs don't support natively and almost no games having done much with that texture format before, so losslessly reencoding them was eating truly astonishing amounts of VRAM to avoid load time issues, and they reworked a bunch of memory management things to make it playable without 12G+ of VRAM.
I don't know if there were any other issues, but at least on that one, it doesn't seem like they needed deep knowledge of the game to try reworking it.
You can prove irrelevant correlation. They weren't even paid for TOTK. The fact that users may have intended to play TOTK is something Yuzu had no control over.
This feels similar to arguing that the Flipper Zero is a car theft tool because people went out and bought one after a video explaining how to use it to break some common car's lock was posted.
I mean, yes, they presumably turned a larger profit correlated to people going and buying it for something illegal, but it's not solely or even primarily used for that, people would be doing this without it, and they didn't have any involvement or encouragement that people do anything criminal with it.
Nintendo is making that argument on the basis that Yuzu's Patreon income skyrocketed when TOTK leaked online.
https://graphtreon.com/creator/yuzuteam
It checks out, TOTK leaked on May 1st 2023 and Yuzus monthly income rose from $19k to $45k throughout May, having never broken $25k previously.