I just want to echo what a few people have mentioned here:
The legality of emulation was strongly upheld under pre-DMCA copyright law in U.S. court decisions where console makers lost against emulator developers.
However, the DMCA gave plaintiffs a whole new set of tools to prevent interoperability. Lots of interoperability and emulation cases have been lost under the DMCA. The DMCA radically limited the prior legal norm that you could create a compatible implementation of a proprietary technology from scratch.
If you agree that there should be a right to reimplement a third-party version of a proprietary system/technology/format/protocol (including one that uses some kind of secrecy to attempt to enforce DRM), you should oppose DMCA §1201.
> The legality of emulation was strongly upheld under pre-DMCA copyright law in U.S. court decisions where console makers lost against emulator developers.
SCEA v. Bleem was filed in 1999, and the DMCA came into effect in 1998.
But the DMCA's 1201 provisions didn't apply to Sony v. Bleem since the DRM scheme of the PlayStation didn't attempt to stop you from copying, but instead focused on stopping a legitimate PS1 from playing copies.
Careful, §1201(a)(1) (to which the exemption rulemaking process applies) was delayed, but §1201(a)(2) and §1201(b) (which don't have the exemption rulemaking attached) were not delayed this way. (a)(1) is an "acts" provision while (a)(2) and (b) are "tools" provisions.
involved a literal emulator. However, none involved an emulator as we would understand the concept (as opposed to "interoperability" more generally). There was also the matter of the PC clones, where IBM's only litigation was against those who literally copied the BIOS, as opposed to those who made compatible hardware without IBM's permission
although conceivably IBM was concerned about antitrust issues there in choosing not to litigate over the non-BIOS-copying clones.
As other commenters pointed out, there are court decisions in favor of emulators in the post-DMCA environment (Connectix and Bleem), where DMCA claims were not raised at all in those specific cases.
These two cases applied pre-DMCA copyright law to the question of the legality of the emulation, but weren't actually pre-DMCA chronologically. I'll take that as a very helpful correction to the way I phrased the point.
I'm pretty sure the true reason behind this lawsuit was that the Yuzu people were running a company selling (on Patreon) "Early Access" to emulator features and access to a private Discord where there was A LOT of user-uploaded Switch ROM dumps floating around and the moderators (employed by the company charging for access) were extremely happy to look the other way.
Also, doesn't Yuzu itself include pre-decrypted ROM dumps from the actual Switch hardware, like for example the OS bootloader ? It's one thing to build an emulator. It's a very different thing to run a company by facilitating piracy. Also, this judgement probably won't financially ruin the Yuzu devs, because they (as persons) were not sued. But it will probably tank their liability-limited company named Tropic Haze LLC. I have a strong feeling that if you'd post lossless rips of pre-release cinema movies to a private (but paid) discord, you'd get a rather similar treatment ;)
EDIT: I mean even the name choice "Tropic Haze" kind of hints at sailing the high seas ;)
EDIT2: Straight from the filing: "The lead developer of Yuzu [..] has publicly acknowledged most users pirate prod.keys and games online"
EDIT3: "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, was unlawfully distributed a week and a half before its release"
I believe that Yuzu includes a standalone implementation of the Switch firmware but can run user-provided firmware because a few games have compatibility issues, and it doesn't run Nintendo's own OS software (you can't run the Switch system menu on it, for example).
But to your larger point: Nintendo being mad about people sharing Switch ROMs or Yuzu funding their work shouldn't have any bearing on the actual legal question of whether Yuzu violates the DMCA anti-circumvention clause. Dolphin argued after legal consultation that inclusion of these keys qualifies under exceptions for interoperability; Yuzu doesn't include the keys at all. It doesn't appear to have been a question tested in the courts yet.
That point _does_ matter if you're making a moral argument about whether Yuzu crossed a line, but given that emulation has been commonplace for almost the entirety of Nintendo's video game business and it has done very little to stop them from staying on top of the game industry, but has enabled millions to experience and be inspired by games they would've otherwise never have been able to play, I'm not terribly convinced that $23k a month in donations is wrong for people putting in serious engineering work into a project that enables that.
Netflix, Steam, and Spotify show that the best deterrent from piracy is easy access.
Eg I would love to play Zelda or Mario but I do not feel like getting a whole switch for it that is just another console in the closet used a couple of times per month at most.
For what it's worth, I did this with the PS4 to play like two or three games. On the other hand, I've played 100%ed more games on the switch than any console since probably super Nintendo or N64. It's had such an amazing run. I do wish they'd release more games though. I played all the donkey Kong country games, super Metroid, and super Mario on the emulator and it was great. I've been thinking about busting the Wii u out just to play wind waker.
> Netflix, Steam, and Spotify show that the best deterrent from piracy is easy access.
Right, and the problem is that piracy in Yuzu is easy. Piracy on a real Switch is much harder (you have to track down an early model Switch if nothing else).
Piracy will almost always be the more convenient option. It is up to companies to provide a better service, as is the case with Steam and (until recently) Netflix. Attacking and shutting down avenues for piracy without doing anything to make your own service more convenient is a losing strategy. Nintendo got 2 million here, but has done virtually nothing to stop the average person from pirating a Switch game. It's for that reason that I honestly don't believe their goal was to stop piracy or emulation with this case, they just saw an easy buck and took it.
> Kids playing Zelda for free might be spending their opportunity cost Money on Xbox instead.
...I don't follow? You're suggesting businesses have a right to attention?
> But Yuzu wasn't acting in good faith. The team saw abuse firsthand and embraced it.
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, they had rules against ROM distribution and some of the links shared as evidence that they didn't have been by unrelated people.
> ...I don't follow? You're suggesting businesses have a right to attention?
Companies should be able to be paid for their products. You have the freedom of taking your money and attention elsewhere, but the illicit piracy of these products is not good for the labor and capital that went into making the product.
In a market of entertainment choices, there are a limited number of dollars that can and will be spent. Certain people are cheating the system to get free entertainment and to double dip.
A gamer that enjoys both Xbox and Nintendo games can get two for the price of one by pirating the latter. Even if there is equal demand for both products, the supply side has been illegally distorted. This doubly lowers the competitive fitness of the latter company.
If I bought and paid for the game, I should be free to emulate. But that's not what's happening here.
> As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, they had rules against ROM distribution and some of the links shared as evidence that they didn't have been by unrelated people.
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, Yuzu embraced piracy. They knew it was happening and focused their energies on enabling new releases and getting users to pay for early access builds.
Emulation is great because it preserves games that would be lost to time after the physical media dies off. Emulation that allows piracy of brand new games is straight up stealing. While I don't feel sorry for large corporations because they screw everyone over as well, there are plenty of cheap older games people can play, or get game pass.
People like to act like they are entitled to these new releases for free. They aren't. Play another game and get it for cheaper later, or emulate it long after its release.
Copying isn't theft, and while you might personally feel that there are zero valid reasons to emulate a game other than for the preservation of old titles I'd expect plenty of others would disagree.
I think the difference between copying 1:1 game and re-creating the game is what can be the discriminator. If you get a game, raw data, and copy bit per bit you're pirating, while if someone re-creates a whole game fro scratch it's a different story.
I would argue that re-creating from scratch is more legal than a straight copy of the original data.
What about your nude photos, sex videos, text messages, emails, and personal health information?
What about your brain and its memories?
What about your intellectual outputs for training AI and selling your skills below your wage?
What if you worked for a game company and they let you go because they didn't hit sales targets?
...
> I'd expect plenty of others would disagree.
What's your use case? That you want better wifi or faster FPS on the Switch?
Because a lot of people on this same forum argue that we need complete control over our iPhone/Android devices. No App Store, no Apple fees, no Apple control. Yet these same people get argued down by much of the audience here.
I'd imagine that many of those arguing in favor of Apple's racket are the same ones arguing it's okay to pirate Nintendo games.
Nintendo has one device that is specialized for a single purpose, and it's positioned in a marketplace full of alternatives. People have broken it and are circumventing its only revenue lever.
This isn't as inconvenient for you as it is for the company scrambling to maintain its most important revenue stream.
> What about your private key? What about your bitcoin? What about your nude photos, sex videos, text messages, emails, and personal health information? What about your brain and its memories?
Those are private. Things openly for sale to the public are not. Someone copying my private data still isn't theft though, since I still possess what was "taken". Much of what you listed (text messages, emails, nudes, health info) have already been copied many times by third parties and on hardware I have no access to or control over and some will likely continue to be copied. As long as my privacy is preserved it really isn't a problem because regardless of those copies I haven't lost anything.
> What about your intellectual outputs for training AI
That may or may not be copyright infringement (we'll see), but it isn't theft.
> What if you worked for a game company and they let you go because they didn't hit sales targets?
That's just life.
> What's your use case? That you want better wifi or faster FPS on the Switch?
There are endless reasons why people might want to emulate a game. Better portability, better performance, personal backups, correcting bugs, accessibility, fan/hobbyist projects, tool assisted speed runs, etc.
> a lot of people on this same forum argue that we need complete control over our iPhone/Android devices.
I'd agree with those people
> I'd imagine that many of those arguing in favor of Apple's racket are the same ones arguing it's okay to pirate Nintendo games.
I'd imagine that a lot of people who feel that we should have control over the software we use and the environment we use it in would support emulation since it too empowers the user.
> Nintendo has one device that is specialized for a single purpose, and it's positioned in a marketplace full of alternatives. People have broken it and are circumventing its only revenue lever.
No one owes Nintendo or their bad business model anything. If I buy a game, I should have the right to do what I want with it. If I come up with a way to play that game on other hardware, or to edit the code in memory to give me extra lives, or to enable the use of a new interface/controller, I should be able to. If having the ability to do those things allows pirates to play a game without paying Nintendo for it that's not my problem. There are perfectly valid reasons beyond piracy for emulation, and that's enough to justify its existence.
It's on Nintendo to change their business model to make their products more appealing to people who currently choose not to give them money. The rest of us shouldn't be forced to have our hands tied in order to preserve Nintendo's desired profits.
> Companies should be able to be paid for their products. You have the freedom of taking your money and attention elsewhere, but the illicit piracy of these products is not good for the labor and capital that went into making the product.
Do companies also have a moral obligation to release their creations in the public domain once their investment has been recouped? Why not?
I will never have bought a console before. Know I'm gonna get Yuzu installed on my EmuDeck as a personal fuck you to Nintendo and play all the games I find interesting (mainly Zelda).
Also worth noting is that while the "Early Access" changes were not kept secret, the Yuzu team went out of its way to make it harder than necessary to replicate an equivalent build from the public Git repo (there was no public EA branch, just a bunch of PRs with a specific tag) and aggressively disapproved of anyone actually forking the project or providing unofficial builds. They couldn't actually stop anyone under the license, but anyone doing so risked being blackballed/banned from official spaces, and in one case a Yuzu developer allegedly even altered the copyright notice on a contribution because it referenced a provider of unofficial EA-equivalent builds [1].
> I mean even the name choice "Tropic Haze" kind of hints at sailing the high seas
1. We know this woman is a witch because she looks like one.
2. We know this woman is a witch because she dresses like one.
3. We know this woman is a witch because she has a wart.
4. We know this woman is a witch because she turned someone into a newt.
5. One burns witches.
6. One burns wood.
7. Witches burn because they are made out of wood.
8. Bridges are made of wood.
9. However, bridges are multiply realizable. They can be built from stone. [Implied] Building a bridge out of the woman will not determine that she is made of wood.
10. Wood floats in water.
11. A duck floats in water [bread, apples, very small rocks, cider, gravy, cherries, mud, churches, lead].
12. If the woman weighs the same as a duck, then she is made of wood.
Yuzu developers didn't put themselves in a favorable position from the community perspective by doing DMCAs and cease-and-desists on people redistributing "early access" builds.. of GPL licensed source code. And the CLA drama, and so on. Ryujinx isn't affected by the self-proclaimed "necessity of productization" of emulation software, and the recent events are not surprising. Some might even say they painted a target on their back.
> Yuzu people were running a company selling (on Patreon) "Early Access" to emulator features and access to a private Discord where there was A LOT of user-uploaded Switch ROM dumps floating around and the moderators (employed by the company charging for access) were extremely happy to look the other way.
This is completely false. The yuzu developers were in no way distributing games or keys to the public, and this was not stated in the lawsuit.
They were, however, known to distribute games and keys amongst themselves in private discord chats for development purposes, and this could've been used as evidence against them if they tried to fight the case.
"The yuzu developers were in no way distributing games or keys to the public"
I agree. They did not distribute games themselves. But they provided a tutorial for ripping games and they were managing the discord where the ripped files were uploaded. And they were very unsuccessful at removing obviously unauthorized game ROM dumps from their discord.
Yes, because that's how you legally play your own purchased games.
> they were managing the discord where the ripped files were uploaded
They were not. You weren't even allowed to mention that you pirated a game on their discord, much less post links to pirated games. Hell, even posting an emulator log file containing a game path pointing to your downloads folder was enough to get you warned.
What is your point? That doesn't mean they support it.
vinnath: "It boggles my mind, time and again, how people can't even pretend at least somewhat intelligently to follow the rules. Seriously, we're aware at least some folks aren't legit, but is it really too much to ask they act like they are?"
> "convincingly PRETEND to follow the rules" (emphasis by them)
vinnath: "Golden had a FIELD DAY going down the Member list on the side and banning any morons who had TotK in their Yuzu playing status... "
vinnath: "As for me, I just bonked anyone who proved their lack of intellect during the TotK leak. I've got no use for anyone who can't at minimum at least convincingly PRETEND to follow the rules."
> "don't have to witch hunt"
ghost: you don't have to witch hunt. They could be referring to the dumps they've done from the past.
That's a list of dumped ROMs. (Posted in 2018, BTW) Notice the "402241866935828490" in the URL? That's the ID of the #support-dumping channel on the Yuzu Discord. Like I said, the Yuzu moderators were very happy to look away when people discussed ROM piracy.
You're correct. It looks to me like the Yuzu team set everything up with the best of intentions. And they were, indeed, helping people dump their own games and they had channel rules that said piracy was not allowed. They started out like an ethical open source project ...
... but around April/May 2023 the moderators made it very clear that it's good enough to PRETEND not pirating the roms. (Can't find the quote atm.) And they were discussing among the mods about people joining due to the TotK leak. And there's hundreds of people who ask "Where can I download game XY?" followed by "Thank you, kind stranger, for the link." and then maybe the rules bot saying "please don't discuss piracy in here".
That all combined makes it easy to argue that the moderators in the Yuzu discord were in April 2023 fully aware that they were actively helping people play the TotK leak. And through Discord and their company, they made money off this activity. (Because you needed the early-access build only available to paid subscribers. They went out of their way to make it close to impossible to compile the supposedly "open" source code yourself.)
"Someone posted a screenshot of a separate torrent's contents in their server 5+ years ago", with no context into why someone posted it or what moderation actions were taken in response, is poor evidence to your accusation.
There's a lot of stuff in that discord that can cause trouble for the moderators. Also, how do you think a lawyer would interpret this:
moderator: "Since April 29th, we've had about 50,000 members join"
random person: "Let's be honest, 40k of that was the zombie horde who rushed the gates when TotK leaked"
moderator: "The support we've been receiving has been incredible Very happy with our community, and we're all honored to be able to provide great software to all our users."
I mean you make a few good points but I specifically called out your TotK edit because it doesn’t seem directly attributable to their team. It’s not like the yuzu people hacked Nintendo. That they may have encouraged piracy on their discord is not really relevant considering what your quote implies (that they somehow helped TotK leak). In any case, I played that leak on my actual switch and subsequently purchased the game as well because it’s amazing. You’re welcome to call me a bad person for doing that, but I would just say that it’s a nuanced issue and people probably don’t deserve to have their lives straight up ruined for it.
This settlement will probably not ruin people's lives, because no person has been sued. It'll ruin their liability-limited company, who had been profiting financially off all of this, but if the liability limit works as intended, then the actual Yuzu developers are shielded from the effects of this lawsuit.
And the reason why I consider the TotK leak problematic is because the moderators were joking about all the new patreon subscribers caused by it. And that means they were, at that time, fully aware that they are enabling large-scale piracy. And their company was making money off it.
The estimate discussed in the discord was 40k leak players, which at $60 each would be 2.4 mio in lost sales. By coincidence, that also matches the settlement amount that Nintendo asked for ;)
I doubt that Nintendo was aware of any of that, aside from maybe the Patreon, when they decided to initiate the litigation process. The Patreon was admittedly risky, but as far as I can tell the settlement states that the emulator itself is illegal as per the DMCA, regardless of whether or not they were making money off of it. If a precedent is set here, it is quite dangerous.
> Also, doesn't Yuzu itself include pre-decrypted ROM dumps from the actual Switch hardware, like for example the OS bootloader ?
As other commenters have pointed out, Yuzu did not include any Nintendo copyrighted assets, so this is wrong.
It’s surprising that someone runs a business like you describe in your post from a jurisdiction where Nintendo can actually get to them.
I really don’t want to support piracy, but there are many countries where Nintendo could never get any access to the company. And all those countries have the internet too.
I don't think they started with that business model. It's more like their users pushed it onto them. And it's very difficult to say no once you've started getting used to the money flowing in. But they did say in their official statement that they "have come to the decision [..] piracy of video games [..] should end".
They didn't start with that business model and they didn't end with that business model, either. Please stop spreading misinformation. The second link in your post isn't even on the main yuzu subreddit, it's just a random person on a random subreddit posting a link, and it's not from their discord.
If you're so eager to argue, then in your opinion, what was their business model? They were running a company and that company has been sued (and not the people behind it or the people working on the emulator, but only the company). How did that company make money?
I mean if you’re in the emulator grey area, you can position yourself as righteously enabling people who have purchased the games, or you can position yourself as a way to play the games without paying.
Anything less than a zero tolerance policy for ROM trading on the corporate discord server is pretty much a declaration of the latter.
Distributing copies of the system bootloader is definitively copyright infringement, even without the awful DMCA section 1201. That aside, reimplementing the bootloader is legal. I haven't dug into the code to see if Yuzu actually is redistributing anything.
It's double as funny because Discord knows of the piracy going on (since they have direct access to all user data and metadata), but the "rights owners" don't pay them enough in the back door to catch them.
Yuzu got me to start buying Nintendo games again. Two weeks ago I coincidentally decided to mod my Switch and extract all of my games to play on my steam deck because I hadn't touched my switch since getting a steam deck. Everything I am now running on my steam deck comes from my personal switch. I have been having so much fun and loving how my games look on an OLED screen. I also appreciate that I didn't have to generate any waste since I continue to only have my two devices rather than buying a new OLED switch. I was about to go on a shopping spree on the Nintendo store to buy more games even though I haven't bought a switch game in 2 years. This is disappointing to hear.
The interesting thing to me is the Wii U was sort of like youtube premium. Everyone complains about youtube ads yey refuses to pay for the ad-free experience. Similarly, I see people complain about not being able to buy old Nintendo games, but the Wii U eShop provided an abundance of retro games for purchase. Most of the retro games I play come from my Wii U. Nintendo has disappointingly made it more and more difficult over the years to buy their older games, but I suppose when it was easy to do, nobody did it unfortunately. All of this would be solved if Nintendo simply sold their games and we were allowed to play it on whatever hardware we want. But I understand why Nintendo doesn't want that and also that many people seem to not want to actually pay for the games they play.
This part I really don't understand. Nintendo has clearly got the technology at play to run everything at least prior to the GameCube on the Switch, ready to roll... but the only way to access those games is to pay for a subscription service which is already kind of annoying, only to then get a drip-feed of a few games every few months, selected by... somebody, no idea who, with no real consistency as to what makes the cut and what doesn't. It's, by all accounts, completely fucking arbitrary.
I love the Switch, it's IMO, the best console Nintendo's turned out in actual decades, and if I was given the option I would buy the shit out of a large library of games from previous Nintendo consoles, and given how many 3rd party projects have made playing those games on all manner of shit, chiefly desktop PCs, a possible thing, I struggle to really sympathize with Nintendo here. And again: the groundwork for this is already laid. I don't know how much work goes between, for example, taking a SNES title like Super Mario RPG and putting it on the Switch's virtual SNES console, but given that their virtual SNES has essentially the same features that every bog standard SNES emulator has had for over 10 years... you'll have to forgive me if I don't think it's much? If any?
I would absolutely understand if they want to playtest each game, make sure it's optimized, make sure there's no graphical oddities, etc. etc. but like... you can do that. I could do that. And hell, if a game made it through with some big glitch, give me the option to send your devs a fuckin email about it in-game with a dump of the memory at the time it happened so they can fix it.
But no, instead, peacemeal releases of games, on a subscription service only, that range from absolutely S-tier iconic to... what the fuck is this in terms of cultural significance. Instead of just a bloody storefront, and let me pick what I want, and pay a reasonable price for it. I'd bet anything if they charged like $9.99 per game for the entire library of NES, SNES, and N64 titles, they'd be absolutely swimming in money.
Like... the big corpos have never understood, this is what gave Steam the position they have now. Piracy is work. Hacking consoles is work. Installing and playing cracked games is work (and risk!). I don't want to work, I want to fucking play Donkey Kong. Give me a legal way to give you a reasonable amount of money so I can play Donkey Kong! And then I get Donkey Kong and you get money! It's the dictionary definition of a win/win scenario.
> I'd bet anything if they charged like $9.99 per game for the entire library of NES, SNES, and N64 titles, they'd be absolutely swimming in money.
This is more or less how it worked on the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS so I would assume that they weren't swimming in money if they decided to change it now.
It wasn't the entire library, of course, but that probably is never going to happen anyways due to licensing issues that pirates don't have to worry about.
> Piracy is work. Hacking consoles is work. Installing and playing cracked games is work (and risk!). I don't want to work, I want to fucking play Donkey Kong
It takes work on the side of companies like Nintendo to make piracy inconvenient. If Nintendo and others didn't spend their resources locking down their consoles and squashing any form of piracy that gets too convenient then the easiest way to play any game would be to pirate it via some community-maintained all-in-one cross-platform game installer and launcher with every game ever dumped available. Then Nintendo would have no hope of competing with convenience. At a minimum they would need some sort of payment and accounting system which would introduce friction compared to a free piracy frontend. So naturally, Nintendo is not interested in engaging in a convenience competition. They want to use the law to maintain total control of how their games can be played, and then use that granted monopoly to make as much money from them as they can. Why sell an older game for a reasonable price if you're the only game in town and can instead use it as leverage to get people to give you money regularly for the privilege of playing it? Even better, bundle the game they want with a bunch that they don't and several that they kinda-sorta want to play at some point maybe? The more you can dilute and confuse the value of a purchase the more you can make off it. Ideally you reach a point where subscribers feel some nebulous obligation to pay you regularly, and the actual service you provide only serves as to assuage cognitive dissonance should a subscriber consider cancelling. "Oh, but I played Earthbound for a few hours last week, and maybe I'll want to get back to that at some point, so I guess I'll keep my subscription"
> It takes work on the side of companies like Nintendo to make piracy inconvenient. ... So naturally, Nintendo is not interested in engaging in a convenience competition.
Oh, sure, but 9/10ths of that is already done. The eShop already exists and distributes purchased DRM-locked content to their hardware. That's my point: all the pieces for this already exist and are implemented. The only problem is the business side that insists on doing this so bizarrely.
> Why sell an older game for a reasonable price if you're the only game in town and can instead use it as leverage to get people to give you money regularly for the privilege of playing it?
I mean, without access to their data I can't say this for sure, but I feel like a monthly subscription for these games is substantially less money than just selling them as is. It feels distinctly like a loss-leader for Nintendo's subscription thing so they can buff the numbers of subscribers.
> Even better, bundle the game they want with a bunch that they don't and several that they kinda-sorta want to play at some point maybe? The more you can dilute and confuse the value of a purchase the more you can make off it.
I really don't think that rule is as hard and fast as you're making it sound. The bundle maybe, sure. But what's the value proposition for all the games not available at all, purchase or subscription? That's my real beef is the arbitrary and often nonsensical selection process.
> Ideally you reach a point where subscribers feel some nebulous obligation to pay you regularly, and the actual service you provide only serves as to assuage cognitive dissonance should a subscriber consider cancelling. "Oh, but I played Earthbound for a few hours last week, and maybe I'll want to get back to that at some point, so I guess I'll keep my subscription"
But again: just price the Earthbound game according to the work required to bring it to the new storefront. Then you're already in the black without needing to sell a subscription in the first place. And sure you aren't continuing to make money off of it, but who's to say you'll continue doing that with the subscription? People find them irritating and no matter what psychological shit you try and pull on them, at some point it's not bad odds they're just going to go "I don't need this" and cancel.
You can do this right now. For example, I have bought retro games from gog and humble that included multiple builds for different systems and platforms, and no restrictions on where you run them - just that you don't distribute them.
Basic summary is that the Yuzu developers agreed to shut down development, give their domain to Nintendo, and delete all copies that they posess of Yuzu and any other Switch hacking tools.
They most likely don't. Most of these settlements have another agreement made behind closed doors.
I was alleged to do stuff related to video game cheats, and was in settlement talks with a company bigger than Nintendo. I didn't end up signing, so a quick overview of what such secret agreements include (the money point is the last one):
- keep everything of the following secret
- be truthful with us and tell us everything
- hand over source code, server access, chats
- shut down social media, websites related to the cheats
- if defendant cant shut down the cheat site, defendant has to try to shut it down via other various means and email the plaintiff once every quarter for three years with the efforts made
- plaintiff will make a public announcement that defendant owes 2.5 million USD (used by the plaintiff for marketing / scaring people off). After X years, the plaintiff agrees to file a full satisfaction of the monetary award (aka plaintiff files that the defendant paid the money and so their credit score isn't totally fucked), BUT in reality the defendant only has to pay the money if they breach any of the terms above.
The same way Bowser did, I suppose. Wage garnishing + whatever Patreon money they earned?
Apparently it's estimated to have made some $1.2 million from patreon so that may help
>why did they settle for that much?
Bad crooked lawyers that said they had no chance or very good lawyers that said they had no chance. IANAL, so I can't truly say which.
> isn't strict emulation legal? Maybe not in the US...
It is AFAIK, apparently the judgement's big argument here is
>Developing or distributing software, including Yuzu, that in its ordinary course
functions only when cryptographic keys are integrated without authorization, violates the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on trafficking in devices that circumvent effective
technological measures, because the software is primarily designed for the purpose of
circumventing technological measures.
Again, I don't know how much water that holds.
>is there something fishy that was hidden somewhere?
Depends on if you think whether or not it would have cost more than $2.5m dollars to fight nintendo in a full battle. I imagine Yuzu doesn't have such funds nor means to. So this was the cheapest option for them.
> As a part of that agreement, Bowser now has to send Nintendo 20-30% of any money left over after he pays for necessities such as rent.
> Bowser has now managed to secure housing, and he thinks that after rent, he has a couple of hundred dollars leftover for food and other necessities. He assumes he’ll be turning to food support services.
Nintendo's not being compensated any meaningful amount. This is nothing more than a lifelong public flogging. And for what?
I'm not pretending that Nintendo is the justice system, although I will admit that the US legal system does confuse me!
The point was that if you have deeper pockets than your opponent then you're able to leverage the legal system to make life hard and stressful for them.
Nintendo has deep pockets and the will to go after anyone it considers a threat to its business model.
Nintendo gave up on doing what was "morally correct" ages ago. That doesn't make anyone else's moral failing acceptable, but comparatively Nintendo's sins are far greater and they've never faced consequences that came remotely close to what they're putting Gary Bowser through.
more people need to just read the "history" section of Nintendo's Wikipedia page. because that "ages ago" is 140 years ago, when the company was founded, by being the only {morally,legally} bankrupt enough people willing to sell their wares to Yakuza-run casinos.
to be fair, they're not unique in this space. but the perception of them as "the family-friendly gaming company" has always been some very big amount of nonsense.
> and they've never faced consequences that came remotely close to what they're putting Gary Bowser through.
His own actions and the legal system are why he is where he is today. Nintendo isn’t putting him anything, unless you now think that Nintendo controls legal decisions that are handed down.
> Developing or distributing software, including Yuzu, that in its ordinary course functions only when cryptographic keys are integrated without authorization, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on trafficking in devices that circumvent effective technological measures, because the software is primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing technological measures.
This seems like a massive stretch to ask a judge to sign off on, since it pretty radically expands what the DMCA covers. If were to come into force, you could slap some encryption on any piece of software and block anyone from interoperating with it.
30k a month is only (roughly rounded) 1 mill per 3 years. So that be 6 years income without spending, and it’s likely their income wasn’t always at this level.
Because Nintendo will just ruin their lives otherwise
> * isn't strict emulation legal? Maybe not in the US...
Thank you DMCA for ruining this scene. The federal government should not be the one interjecting itself into this area, but here we are. Because of the anti-circumvention rules of the DMCA, right to repair is completely broken. Heck, WV was able to hide them lying about emissions because of it.
If down voters want to explain their objection we'd probably all benefit - this may sound pithy but afaict parent is correct: Tropic Haize LLC is the defendant in TFA; LLC stands for Limited Liability Company. IANAL but this essentially means the company is on the hook for the damages, if it doesn't have that much then Nintendo probably becomes it's most senior creditor (gets paid first) in bankruptcy, but its directors (the emulator devs, presumably) are unlikely to be personally liable, at least wouldn't be in a judgement on this case. Settling would I assume imply that Nintendo thinks it is getting paid (won't bankrupt the company, or directors agreed to kick it in) though.
plot twist: they leave it up, collect telemetry to match and understand the data behind pirating vs. owned emulation, find it useful to open the platform, focus on services, and build their business to 10x on software almost exclusively
not probable, but that would be interesting to see
some grapevine reports indicate yuzu paid reviewers with early access to some games for pre-retail dumps that were then used to have speedy day1 compat.
it could be wrong, totk just leaked a week before release.
This feels like a "so what" issue to me. Maybe the early release guys who sold their copies should be in trouble for breaking a contract, but the Yuzu guys should be in the clear.
Paying someone to break the law makes you culpable. Paying someone to violate an NDA or other agreement with a private company you have no direct association with doesn't ordinarily make you culpable.
This is sad. Yuzu was such a well polished emulator. I hope everyone backs up a copy of yuzu and hopefully someone some day would continue the development...
Relative to what? Emulators are inherently complex software, and yuzu more than most since it has to deal with modern concerns like GPU drivers, game updates, DLC, etc. For all that it does, it is fine, it mostly works quite well.
The installers don't actually work, because wherever they hosted the updates is gone.
I see a lot of people on Twitter lamenting that 3DS emulation is dead, but Citra was more or less a finished product, and third-party builds will undoubtedly be up within hours.
Examine all Nintendo software releases for potential violations of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) licenses, and if any are identified, take legal action to ensure compliance, similar to their approach with emulator developers.
I grew up with Nintendo being my "main" game console and to this day I play (Switch) but I'm starting to wonder, might this be a company that's worth boycotting? Sure I'd miss out on the exclusives but lots of games exist on multiple platforms or have similar games on other platforms.
Nintendo's behaviour seems to be very much anti hacker and even anti-consumer in cases like this one. Anyone else have any strong feelings about this?
Nintendo's been a horrible company in this regard for ages. Personally I've never given them money besides for Tears of the Kingdom when it released - I don't even own a Switch, I borrowed one to play it. They make good games sometimes but that's the first and last time they're getting any money from me.
I disagree. The other platforms built their walls secure enough that they don't bother. Nintendo is aggressively defending a low fence.
Most Nintendo cartridges will function a decade from now. Many discs for other consoles don't even have the full game on it... and many can't function without connecting to a service. I'd prefer the system that is possible to preserve (but gets aggressive with monetization) then the one that's impossible to preserve.
Points to xbox for doing well with backwards compatibility and carrying libraries forward. But that could change in future.
The problem with this list is a lot of the non-exclusive games are because they're on the PS4 as well – what proportion of games are non-exclusive to the playstation world?
A lot of games are only on PS5 and Xbox S/X, not available on PC or other platforms. So if it's exclusive only to other securely walled gardens, they still don't need to bother.
Most of those are either remakes of older games, VR games, games that haven't been released yet, or games with poor ratings. The only real title there worth buying today would be Spider-Man 2.
I'm pretty disappointed in the PS5's library but for someone who never had a PS4 the PS5 is absolutely worth it. Maybe by the time they get through the backlog of good PS4 games there will be something worth playing on the PS5
Nintendo’s disdain for historical preservation is frustrating and problematic. But this is an emulator for their current console, I’m not sure this is boycott-worthy. This is more, they’ve got a business to run, and Yuzu impacts their bottom line in a way that Dolphin doesn’t.
>Yuzu impacts their bottom line in a way that Dolphin doesn’t.
Dolphin could emulate nearly all commercial Wii games by April 2009.
That was sooner into the console's lifespan than where we are now with the switch. (29 months since the Wii's release vs 83 months since the Switch's release)
Maybe more people have gaming-grade computers sitting around now than they did 15 years ago?
>Maybe more people have gaming-grade computers sitting around now than they did 15 years ago?
You don't need a very powerful computer to emulate a Switch. My M1 Mac Mini w/ 8GB of RAM (~$400) has been able to play every Switch game I've been interested in with equal or slightly better performance than the actual console.
Most popular Wii games had significantly different control schemes than what is available on a standard PC. Afaik, dolphin was primarily used for things like Smash Bros but other system sellers like Wii Sports, Wii fit, and LoZ: Skyward Sword just wouldn't work at all. Even Mario Kart was typically played with motion controls, because that was new and exciting for home consoles at the time.
Contrast that to the Switch where most system sellers can be played on a standard controller without a gyroscope, the threat to their bottom line is much higher.
The wiimotes are just bluetooth and the tracking is 5 LEDs. I've used candles instead of the sensor bar before. You can buy a "dolphin bar" for $20 and use your wiimotes on the PC. It works great. I dumped my wii games and haven't touched the console in years.
Yeah I've used the candle trick with a Wii before too, but that doesn't mean it isn't a much larger barrier for entry than Switch games working most of the time with just a standard controller (and therefore keyboard mapping). As for controllers, I don't think I even had bluetooth in a desktop PC until somewhat recently (~3 years ago) when I paid a little extra for a motherboard with WiFi 6 and BT built-in.
While that's a fair point, I also have to wonder how much of that is actually lost sales, vs. people who wouldn't have bought the games otherwise, or didn't have a Switch to play on, or etc.
Personally, I paid for a copy of Tears of the Kingdom when it came out, but only because I had a Switch I could borrow from someone to play it on - if I hadn't had that option, I wouldn't have bought a Switch just to play one game, and I just wouldn't have bought the game at all.
Had they released the game on PC as well as Switch, I would have bought it for PC, but that's not an option. As it stands, either you have to own an overpriced and underpowered console, even if you only want to play one Nintendo game, or you can pirate the game and play it on PC, and have a much better experience than on a real Switch. Nintendo is somewhat bringing this upon itself in my opinion and I don't feel much sympathy for their lost profits, real or imagined.
Valve used the Yuzu emulator in some of its Steam Deck initial marketing, and emulating the Switch is one of the most popular uses for the Steam Deck, so there is definitely a measurable impact.
Considering that the Steam Deck is more expensive than the Switch, arguably every SD player using Yuzu is several lost sales for Nintendo.
Nintendo is somewhat bringing this upon itself in my opinion and I don't feel much sympathy for their lost profits, real or imagined.
This is why they are going after Yuzu in the first place...Because Yuzu makes it easy to pirate Switch games and the pirates feel entitled to play those games on a more expensive device than the device they claim is too expensive.
Yes but the more expensive device is better in every conceivable way, it's a PC instead of a locked down walled garden that only exists as a platform for nintendo products. Just because someone owns a Deck doesn't mean they would otherwise own a switch, I own a Deck and haven't remotely considered buying any nintendo hardware since gamecube. If I couldn't emulate switch games I just wouldn't play them.
Anecdotally, the friends that I know who have a gaming PC own a Switch as well. The one guy running TotK @ 4K/60FPS on their rig was also the first to preorder the game. But we're all in our 30's with decent salaries.
> If I couldn't emulate switch games I just wouldn't play them.
Given this discussion started around whether to boycott Nintendo or not, it seems that you're not a Nintendo customer at all. So I'm not really sure what you would be boycotting?
I'm just chiming in to dispute the 'Deck owner with a switch emulator = lost sales' point that was made, but yes I've already been unconsciously 'boycotting' them for a while now.
How is the Switch overpriced and underpowered? I picked up a switch lite with a game as a bundle for my wife for £180 brand new. If you want detachable controllers and the ability to dock the Switch to a TV, you can spend more. But those features and the built-in screen are ones that literally no other games console had at the time and is only just starting to gain popularity in the handheld PC market recently. It may be underpowered now, but the Switch has been out for 7 years. And it still has enough power to play games like TOTK, The Witcher 3, Xenoblade Chronicles, etc.
As for releasing games on PC, I don't see any reason why they would? Developing for PC is much more difficult than a single console, when it comes to handling the variety of hardware, anti-cheat, etc. TOTK and their Mario games are system sellers, with the former even releasing alongside a special edition console and pro controller. Delaying the release of these games to add dev time for a PC port is never going to be worth it.
Preservation isn't a matter of flipping a light switch on the moment a console isn't "current" anymore. The Switch came out in 2017 - that's a long time ago. If not for people preserving firmware updates and 1.0 builds of games, emulator developers and users would have nothing to start from when they start development on an emulator from scratch in ~2025 like you suggest doing.
The emulator could have been developed and released open source without the ability to decrypt Nintendo games, which (I believe) is a copyright violation and one side of the lawsuit. And also not put the latest emulator builds and private discord encouraging piracy behind a patreon paywall.
I have nothing against a Switch emulator existing at all, but making it conveniently easy for the masses to pirate games, condoning it in private spaces you manage, and profiting off the demand for the emulator due to that piracy are all against the ideas of preservation.
No it doesn't necessarily change what the emulator is used for, but it changes the optics on what it's developed for. If you develop an emulator without any methods of DRM circumvention built-in, then out-of-the-box it can only be used for homebrew stuff like making your own games/apps for that platform.
If you include DRM circumvention with the emulator, then there's an argument that it's developed specifically with piracy in mind.
I stopped playing Nintendo products (on any platform, including my Switch) years ago and haven't really missed much. They put out good games, sure, but there are tons of good games available on other platforms where buying them isn't supporting a company that abuses the legal system to harass and imprison innocent people.
If you're talking about Bowser, the only thing they convicted him of is "conspiracy" to do things that shouldn't be illegal [1]. All the other charges were dropped. If you think "conspiring" to sell modchips is a crime worthy of prison I don't know how to convince you that we should have a fair and just legal system. It was a plea, too, and anyone who knows the legal system well understands that plea bargains are generally unjust and used to bully people into not defending themselves.
1: "Gary Bowser, 52, a Canadian national of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, pleaded guilty in October 2021 to Conspiracy to Circumvent Technological Measures and to Traffic in Circumvention Devices, and Trafficking in Circumvention Devices."
Personally, I only get DRM-free games, which mostly means GOG at this point (they also have a better refund policy). They have some issues too but seem to be much better than any other game stores in terms of customer friendly policies (unless you really want Linux support). I definitely wouldn't switch to Sony or Microsoft from Nintendo, that would make no sense (surprisingly there are a few Sony published games on GOG, although the latest announced one was supposed to be released a few months ago now so I'm suspicious that Sony was trying to sneak some DRM in and got caught). Reguarding Steam some would argue the Linux support makes up for the DRM, although I can't agree with that. Most of the other small platforms I've seen have DRM but with little or no positive. Itch mostly has solo developer games, doesn't clearly indicate if a game has DRM or not but mostly has DRM-free games, and has no refund policy other than what individual developers decide to do. Humble used to have some DRM-free games but has moved away from that under current ownership.
There's no point boycotting one company playing by the system rules.
Boycott the system which enable this much centralisation of power and removes freedom from citizens.
Copyright and patents are an artifact of the government being easily corruptible by media companies who make insane amount of money.
Until we get rid of the government we'll always have laws which help the rich steal from the people.
Well, we certainly aren't getting rid of the government, and it's an up-cliff battle to change current copyright and patent laws, so the best we can do is starve the companies that abuse these systems. Then they will have less money to perform lobbying and other activities.
I've been "boycotting" them for a while now. Switch was cool, but they just cannot be reasonable when it comes to IP, so I just cannot stomach giving them any money. I'm not interested in applicable laws or "playing by the rules" or whatever other handwavy bullshit people will feed themselves to pretend that Nintendo is "in the right" here.
It's pretty simple: don't target people who aren't doing things that are morally reprehensible, even if it's a systemic threat to your company (cue the laughter from the capitalists who can't understand anything beyond industrial machinations). Evolve and adapt to include them in your assets, or die while the fitter companies do. Someday, someone's going to have more money than Nintendo and they will force Nintendo to do whatever they want them to. I'm just hoping its sooner rather than later. They've earned every second of their demise. Fuck any company that thinks lawfare is excusable as 'might makes right'.
The yuzu people were doing things that are morally reprehensible. From what I've heard:
* They managed a private discord with hired moderators that actively encouraged piracy.
* They saved important releases to coincide with major game releases like TOTK. These releases would include performance optimizations and bug fixes specifically for those games.
* These important releases would initially only be available behind a patreon paywall (like the private discord), so they actively profited off people trying to get the latest release specifically for pirating the latest games.
>might this be a company that's worth boycotting? Sure I'd miss out on the exclusives but lots of games exist on multiple platforms or have similar games on other platforms.
As far as I'm concerned, this is an issue of the DMCA more than Nintendo itself. In the strictest sense, devs really don't care about this and lawyers are only doing their job.
Boycotting Nintendo may make sense in a moral sense, but not one that will change how the DMCA works.
>Nintendo's behaviour seems to be very much anti hacker and even anti-consumer in cases like this one. Anyone else have any strong feelings about this?
Anti-hacker, sure. 99% of companies are anti-hacker.
Anti-consumer... First, I really think this is the worst modern cliche of modern media discourse. Just to remind people of the definition:
> Anti-consumerism is concerned with the private actions of business corporations in pursuit of financial and economic goals at the expense of the public welfare, especially in matters of environmental protection, social stratification, and ethics in the governing of a society.
I don't really see how luxury entertainment can ever meet the true philosophical meaning of the term that halts social progress and suppressing the flow of money to the populace.
With all that said, the closest I feel Nintendo has gotten to anti-consumerism is the "vault" strategy done with Mario All Stars. Which they seemingly only did for that game and a few of those "100 multiplayer" style games. It's a strategy making use of false scarcity for a product that can be infinitely reproducible (and requires no servers on their end to operate) in order to increase urgency to play/buy said work. Not only is that morally repugnant, I'm not even sure if it's a financially sound decision for a company who's products are known for having a long tail in sales, unlike most video games.
----
in the colloquial sense of:
>not favorable to consumers : improperly favoring the interests of businesses over the interests of consumers.
every business technically strides to be anti-consumerist. The act of charging money for a product is anti-consumerist. I don't see how Nintendo differs here, nor how they are the worst, in a world where almost every AAA company in the west is trying to rely on psuedo-subscriptions with battle passes and every company in the east are making millions on mobile off of the lootbox model.
Nintendo seemed to dip their toes in indirectly a few times (reminder: they do not fully own any of the remaining IPs using Lootboxes) but mostly have pulled out, even removing the gacha from a few of their games. So they for the most part simply profit from an online service with "free" games and one time purchase of other console games.
Arguably, precedent (Bleem) supports yuzu here, the reality is that Nintendo doesn't really need a sound legal foundation to file a lawsuit against you, and their legal team can outspend almost anyone on the planet, so they can probably force almost anyone into a settlement, just like yuzu. The DMCA is a plague but I think this case would have resulted in a settlement even if the DMCA didn't exist, because Nintendo's resources dwarf the yuzu team's to that extent.
The problem (as per usual) is that the legal system is horribly biased in favour of whoever has the most money/resources. When one side has millions/billions to spend on lawyers and legal fees and the other doesn't, then the former is almost certainly going to drive the latter into settling (or bankruptcy), regardless of whether the latter did anything illegal.
There needs to be a way to fix the system so that both sides of any court battle are on (fairly) equal footing, and having significantly more resources than your opponent doesn't tilt the field in your favour in any practical way.
I am all for there being emulators for past consoles as a form of preservation as the hardware gets harder and harder to get. Has Nintendo ever gone after Dolphin except for the Steam thing?
But, emulating a current console is not about preservation. It just isn't. You can try to say it is, but no. Maybe, maybe you could argue that you are putting in the work now so it's ready when it's needed. But then be careful about putting it out there.
Just go look at the steam deck subreddit and how often Switch games are talked about, I can't imagine Nintendo was very happy about that. This wasn't just some small project that people did not really know about or served a niche purpose.
This as asking for trouble and I am surprised it took so long honestly.
Edit:
Don't get me wrong, I hate exclusives and I wish the practice would end. But that is the current state of things and the choices leading up to this were questionable at best.
Edit Again:
Hold up, Yuzu was an actual company and had a Patreon bringing in over $29k a month? Yeah um, Nintendo has been bad but that's a choice for a current console. It is no surprise Nintendo went after them.
Obviously piracy plays a large (maybe the largest?) role here, though I wouldn't overlook the modding use case. I would be quite interested in running titles I legitimately own on more powerful hardware where I can play around with the resolution and framerate freely (and would have already used Yuzu for this purpose by now, but for laziness).
This is the only reason I have Yuzu installed - I own Tears of the Kingdom legitimately but the Switch is such a piece of underpowered, overpriced junk that I'll never replay the game on real hardware, when I can instead be playing at 1440p and 60fps with all kinds of enhancements on PC.
I just have a very hard time believing that, like you said, the majority of the use case is anything other than piracy.
I mean almost every emulation software somewhere says that you should only emulate games you own, but how many of us actually still own our NES or gamecube games that we may have downloaded. But it's easier to justify given that stuff not being easily accessible anymore, we don't even have a proper eshop for emulation on the Switch.
I feel like the difference here should be fairly obvious.
One is an open protocol, and one is proprietary technology. AWS even at one point supported the protocol.
I don't know if it's still a thing but it wasn't terribly uncommon to find Linux distros and other legitimate things shared through that protocol.
Here we are talking about proprietary technology by Nintendo. On a system that they are currently selling and making money on.
Given how much money they were bring in on patrion, it isn't much different than if they tried to make a physical knock off switch that could run switch games.
> x86 is also proprietary technology. Should Intel be able to sue AMD out of existence?
AMD has a perpetual license from Intel to use the technology.
Nouveau is different, you are still buying Nvidia cards just running an open source driver. Nvidia doesn't make money on their drivers, they make money on the graphics cards.
Similar situation to Ruffle, Adobe never charged for the end user to download flash. It was free. Ruffle is an alternative to that. Also it is worth mentioning that flash is all but dead and this really just keeps it breathing.
While both companies probably could make an argument to argue for a take down of both, they have no incentive to do it.
> AMD has a perpetual license from Intel to use the technology.
AMD only managed to negotiate that because Intel lost in arbitration [1]. Intel's preferred option was always to eliminate AMD entirely. It's good for us consumers that they didn't succeed in that!
> While both companies probably could make an argument to argue for a take down of both, they have no incentive to do it.
NVIDIA absolutely has an incentive to get rid of Nouveau. Its existence discloses IP (their GPU inner workings) that they would prefer to keep secret.
More examples: JavaScript was proprietary technology at the time. The fact that it was specific to Netscape browsers absolutely benefited Netscape's business model. The existence of Chrome depends on the fact that Netscape had no grounds to go after Microsoft for an independent implementation.
SMB is a proprietary Microsoft technology. '90s Microsoft would definitely have preferred to keep that specific to Windows in order to sell more Windows licenses. It's good for the industry that Microsoft never felt they could go after Samba.
Another fun one: The FBX file format, which Autodesk makes money on through Maya, has a half-hearted attempt at DRM in it to limit it to approved Autodesk licensees. Blender's FBX exporter breaks it with a pass-the-hash attack. Get rid of that and Blender can no longer talk to Unity. Obviously, the entire industry benefits from the fact that Autodesk can't go after Blender for this.
> AMD only managed to negotiate that because Intel lost in arbitration [1]. Intel's preferred option was always to eliminate AMD entirely. It's good for us consumers that they didn't succeed in that!
OK? regardless of why or how it happened, it happened and it means that AMD is fine. If you knew that I don't know why you even mentioned it in the first place.
> NVIDIA absolutely has an incentive to get rid of Nouveau. Its existence discloses IP (their GPU inner workings) that they would prefer to keep secret.
> Another fun one: The FBX file format, which Autodesk makes money on through Maya, has a half-hearted attempt at DRM in it to limit it to approved Autodesk licensees. Blender's FBX exporter breaks it with a pass-the-hash attack. Get rid of that and Blender can no longer talk to Unity. Obviously, the entire industry benefits from the fact that Autodesk can't go after Blender for this.
Again would love an article on this. I can't find anything backing up that this ever happened. Not only on Audodesk's website do they mention third party software but they have an SDK for this file format for others to use. While blender does in fact not use that SDK, and the format is proprietary, I can't find anything backing up what you claim.
> OK? regardless of why or how it happened, it happened and it means that AMD is fine.
AMD is only fine because Intel wasn't able to sue them out of existence. If Intel had managed to do in the 90s what Nintendo did to Yuzu just now, there'd be no Ryzen today.
> Seems counter to Nvidia offering support in publishing documents
NVIDIA only started publishing documents because Nouveau's success in reverse engineering meant that it was pointless trying to pretend that the genie could be put back in the bottle. Nintendo undoubtedly knows this too; lawsuits like this in 2024 ultimately aren't rational moves on their part, but big conservative Japanese companies have never been known to be particularly adaptable.
> Again would love an article on this. I can't find anything backing up that this ever happened. Not only on Audodesk's website do they mention third party software but they have an SDK for this file format for others to use. While blender does in fact not use that SDK, and the format is proprietary, I can't find anything backing up what you claim.
I found it myself when I was documenting the FBX file format (which I eventually gave up on because it was too horrifying of a format to motivate continuing) [1]. Blender calls it "CRC rules", but I think it's actually an attempt to lock non-licensees out. The SDK is closed-source, proprietary, and comes with a whole bunch of restrictions in its EULA.
>x86 is also proprietary technology that Intel is currently making money on. Should Intel be able to sue AMD out of existence?
AMD has a license to the x86 architecture, alongside Via (though I'm not sure if they even make x86 chips anymore). I'm sure Intel would love to take back AMD's license, but they're probably too afraid of antitrust actions to try.
Yep. It's a great example of how keeping clean-room reverse engineering legal is good for the industry. While Intel was stuck in Itanium hell, AMD was able to leapfrog them and create x86-64 because it had been legally successful with reverse engineering 32-bit x86 in the past. If Intel had been able to crush AMD in the 90s, there's a good chance x86 would be dead by now.
Android built their own implementation of the proprietary Java language to be able to run programs that were written to run on the official JRE. Can you imagine if Oracle tried to sue Google over that? :)
> Given how much money they were bring in on patrion, it isn't much different than if they tried to make a physical knock off switch that could run switch games.
Why would that be a problem? As long as they're not actually violating trademarks or patents and making an actual counterfeit product, there is no reason why they shouldn't be able to make their own hardware that is compatible with Switch games.
These products already exist for other systems, and they are a good way to allow you to play your existing games on more modern hardware.
Just because it upsets some executive at Nintendo doesn't make it illegal.
A torrent client is data agnostic. It can be used to transfer any type of data over the internet.
Yuzu is designed to play specific software which is quite difficult to acquire by legal means. Very little effort appears to have been spent on improving the UX of the legal process.
(It is true that Yuzu can also play homebrew software. I think the situation would be different if Yuzu was tested exclusively on Homebrew, and only emulated features which homebrew software uses. But then no one would care about Yuzu. Yuzu has tons of game-specific fixes for commercial titles.)
> (It is true that Yuzu can also play homebrew software. I think the situation would be different if Yuzu was tested exclusively on Homebrew, and only emulated features which homebrew software uses. But then no one would care about Yuzu. Yuzu has tons of game-specific fixes for commercial titles.)
Yuzu can also play games that were backed up by people who legitimately own the game. The legality of that might be questionable in the US, but not everywhere.
Did you... not even read the entire line that you decided to just quote part of?
> But, emulating a current console is not about preservation. It just isn't. You can try to say it is, but no. Maybe, maybe you could argue that you are putting in the work now so it's ready when it's needed. But then be careful about putting it out there.
Especially considering that consoles have a less than stellar support from manufacturers, they just move on to the next console and you can say goodbye to your games, especially nowadays with game servers.
Nintendo have typically been pretty good with backwards compatibility as newer versions of consoles come out. GBAs could play GB/GBC games. DS could play GBA games. 3DS could play DS. Wii could play GC games. Wii U could play Wii games.
The Switch is an outlier in that regard but mostly because the hardware is so different from previous consoles. It could never support the 2 screens required for DS/3DS or some Wii U games, nor is it big enough to fit Wii U disks anyway. But it wouldn't surprise me if the Switch 2 could play Switch 1 games.
Nintendo also typically put entire games on their cartridges, and day 1 patches are for bug fixes only and are optional. If you keep the cartridges and your console, you keep your games perfectly fine. Or you can go out and buy cartridges second hand. And digital downloads will also still function, like my 3DS still has my digital purchases even if the eshop is gone. I just can't purchase new games anymore, for a 12 year old system.
> Hold up, Yuzu was an actual company and had a Patreon bringing in over $29k a month? Yeah um, Nintendo has been bad but that's a choice for a current console. It is no surprise Nintendo went after them.
LOL
Yeah, as much as I am an anti-fan of Nintendo, it sounds like this company was asking to get sued.
> But, emulating a current console is not about preservation. It just isn't.
No, but it CAN be used as a tool to play legitimate copies of games on different hardware. A few people on this thread have said they do this. I haven't done it yet, but I'll probably dump the Switch games I want to play on my Deck instead of carrying the switch also.
> emulating a current console is not about preservation. It just isn't. You can try to say it is, but no. Maybe, maybe you could argue that you are putting in the work now so it's ready when it's needed. But then be careful about putting it out there.
What do you think of piracy in general? When would you consider pirating a PC game would be acceptable?
The reality is that the modern gaming industry is actively hostile to the consumer. Content is locked behind intrusive DRM, store front exclusivity deals, licensing terms that may revoke your access at any point, obnoxious launchers, always online requirements, reliance on servers that may disappear at any moment, insidious subscriptions, microtransactions, and many other schemes ranging from shady to borderline illegal. Hype-driven marketing pushing pre-orders based on lies, followed by empty promises of multi-year roadmaps to get games in a playable state. Yearly releases of rehashed and reskinned content, low-effort and premature "remasters"... The list goes on and on.
Is someone who plays a pirated version of a game they purchased, but can't access anymore, in the wrong? Or how about if they prefer the pirated version because it gives a better experience? Or how about if they're tired of always getting the short end of the stick by playing by the rules? The law says they are, but are they really?
The morality here is not so black and white.
BTW, I agree with you that Yuzu was clearly overstepping the boundaries, and that it's no surprise Nintendo took them out. I just think that Nintendo doesn't necessarily have the moral high ground, and that there's a strong argument in favor of not only emulation, but piracy.
Apple Silicon machines have a "permissive security" mode which allows booting unsigned third party kernels. Asahi isn't circumventing anything, this is a officially supported feature.
>But, emulating a current console is not about preservation. It just isn't.
I disagree in the general case. Sure, beware of litigious companies, but it isn't immoral.
In the specific case of Yuzu bringing in cash from the endeavor, yes, I see why Nintendo did what they did.
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Totally off-topic, but I have never bought a Switch despite liking the idea of all the games on it, because I don't want to pay $600 for a gameboy, 2-4 real controllers and a copy of Mario Party. I can't understand how it or Steam Deck is popular. But that's just me.
I don’t think preservation is an important argument. If I own an AppleTV, and I purchase a movie through their service, why should it be illegal for me to export that movie to watch on a different device? I own the hardware and the data, why would any law even care at that point?
Obviously piracy should be illegal, but I just don’t see any argument against emulation even if it is current.
You don't own the data, just a temporary right to use it.
Of course it's completely bonkers and the result of massive corporations bribing governments to limit our freedom.
As long as I don't sign a contract with an entity I should be able to do anything I want with bytes. Once I enter into an agreement not to share some data I received then I should be punishable - but no shortcuts, sue everyone in court with a due process and lawyer fees.
Copyright and patents are the most retarded and culture damaging thing I've seen in my lifetime
Quite a pithy phrase that has been popular lately but piracy advocates have always claimed that piracy isn't stealing, regardless of whether or not "buying is owning" so I don't think the two are related.
> You don't own the data, just a temporary right to use it.
Agreed, bonkers. You didn't 'own the data' when it was a VCR recording a broadcast TV show or movie, but now it's all "but they broke our ROT13-super-crypto, throw the book at 'em".
Pretty sure the TOS of AppleTV prohibits exporting the movie - you have a limited license to view it only under the circumstances Apple dictates, in partnership with everyone Apple has deals with. If you want to be able to watch it on other devices, you need to purchase a limited perpetual license in the form of a DVD/bluray.
Now, of course, this depends on the movie having a physical release (which is becoming a bit of a rarity these days), but still, the MPAA has made sure to write ironclad contracts to prohibit watching streamed content the way you want.
For this reason, most of the major studios are members of Movies Anywhere, which allows you to access movies purchased at any (participating) storefront on any participating VOD service. Amazon, Fandango, Vudu, Disney, are participants.
It's generally not, because you can run an OS on a PS5 that can then run the game, and the DMCA allows for this (with some limitations) because, and this is a very important point: there is generally no DRM-hacking required. But...if DRM hacking is required to get a PC game to work on a PS5, it's illegal to do so under the DMCA. (Note: DRM is defined very broadly for DMCA purposes.)
Dolphin does require a bit of DRM hacking, but Dolphin (arguably) falls under one of the DCMA exceptions for archival use purposes. This is the second important point: the Dolphin emulates a system which has not been on sale for a decade. It's still possible* to use it for general piracy instead of archival access, but the archival use trumps the piracy concern. (It would be different though if the Dolphin developers started offering Dolphin on a commercial basis.)
But Yuzu is a commercial offering, for a console that is still on sale, and its use requires DRM hacking. So it's got 3 fatal flaws.
The only surprise is that Nintendo let it live as long as it has. You can bet they won't make that mistake again with their next console.
> ...and this is a very important point: there is generally no DRM-hacking required. But...if DRM hacking is required to get a PC game to work on a PS5, it's illegal to do so under the DMCA. (Note: DRM is defined very broadly for DMCA purposes.)
Wouldn't Steam, MSTF store, Epic, etc. all count as DRM? Regardless, it's more of a philosophical argument than a legal argument. If I buy the Switch and the game, I don't see how there could be any argument that I should be considered a criminal for using the data on a PC.
Wouldn't Steam, MSTF store, Epic, etc. all count as DRM?
They could, which is why I was careful to point out that you can install an OS on your PS5, on which you can then run (some) games on it without having to circumvent DRM.
If I buy the Switch and the game, I don't see how there could be any argument that I should be considered a criminal for using the data on a PC.
Because U.S. (and EU) law doesn't have any exceptions that would cover that use, since the Switch is still being actively sold on the market today. (And as noted elsewhere, this is a large part of why SNES, N64, and Gamecube emulators haven't been targeted by Nintendo: the machines are no longer sold and so emulation allows for archival use/access to games on those platforms. This is generally a permitted use.)
As far as I'm aware, the DMCA doesn't have any sort of exception for archival, but it does have one for software interoperability, which emulators definitely are, regardless of how current the hardware being emulated is.
So long as Nintendo doesn't end up going after emulators released before the Switch, then the de facto (not de jure) precedent is: don't release an emulator for their current latest console.
Overall, that's probably a mostly fine outcome for game preservation, and thinking about it more, it's probably much better for emulation and game preservation long term that Yuzu's devs settled instead of fighting this, as if they had lost and a legal precedent were set, many other emulators might have had to shut down or be hosted in countries where the DMCA doesn't apply. But with no legal precedent set here, emulators for consoles released before the Switch might very well be safe. Time will tell though.
I pay for all the games I play, sometimes going way out of my way to do so (obscure japaese studios who don't sell outside), but I will never pay a company that attacks my rights. I say that as an x-nintindo superfan who owned every generation and 100s of games up until the wii when I learned of nintendo's outright delusional takes on reality and there abuse and misuse of laws and the legal system.
You are free to also delude yourself and call it piracy and "stealing" all you want, but emulation and playing ripped games absolutely is - and will hopefully remain - your right.
(i buy used games and use yuzu to play them. fuck nintendo.)
Rather, multiple companies make games for one console. If you buy those games not made by Nintendo from sources other than Nintendo's shops then you can boycott Nintendo without boycotting non-Nintendo game developers.
I believe developers on consoles always pay the console manufacturer a fee per-copy, so not so much, but that's probably the way that pays Nintendo the least.
EDIT: Just remembered the second hand market. Carry on.
I think their point is that you're not taking a principled stand by stealing. If it matters enough to you to "boycott" the company, walk the walk and don't play the games by any means.
There might not be copyright infringement involved, so "stealing" is an unnecessary assumption (on top of being a misleading term for copyright infringement). Since Nintendo isn't the only source for games that run on Nintendo consoles, Nintendo might not get money from the self-proclaimed boycotter. But since there's no guarantee that Nintendo won't get money from the self-proclaimed either, I can understand why people would view the following scenario as cognitively dissonant:
A person only buys physical copies of non-Nintendo-made games which run on Nintendo devices from people reselling legally-distributed copies (legal in the US with the first-sale doctrine, which unfortunately doesn't apply to digital copies). The person plays those games by ripping the files and running them on third-party emulators. The person publicly states that they boycott Nintendo the company and that they play non-Nintendo-games made for Nintendo consoles. Resellers might or might not spend their money on more Nintendo games.
By the way, iamunr didn't claim to boycott Nintendo. Perhaps iamunr buys Nintendo games but plays them on emulators. throwaway48r7r didn't provide any information about whether they'll continue playing non-Nintendo-made games for Nintendo consoles.
"Your entire gaming experience will be better if you spend twice as much on new hardware than something which came out 7 years ago, and also forfeit a bunch of other switch features like motion controls and detachable joycons"
Same thoughts. They should triple-up their public image efforts and make sure any shared ROM link on Ryujinx controlled infrastructure results in a ban or something, otherwise Nintendo comes for them next.
It's what Dolphin did - so much as a sniff about piracy and you're banned. It was unfortunately still rather common - people just can't stop telling on themselves - and that's after big warnings in every part of the forum sign up process and on the post page too.
I'm not sure they really lost much from the community because it of though - the vast majority banned were just "Free Gamez Pls" - and coming down on things like that hard can make sense if you don't want more of that creeping over time.
It's open source. If there are people interested in continuing development it won't go away. And even if there aren't the current version will still work fine, just maybe not for future games.
this is what i thought too, since it's just a settlement between Tropic Haze and Nintendo rather than a more broad ruling. but somebody linked this settlement elsewhere here and it adds up to distribution of the Yuzu code likely being a DMCA violation [1]
FINDINGS OF FACT
...
3. Yuzu, a video game emulator, circumvents the Technological Measures and allows for the play of encrypted Nintendo Switch games on devices other than a Nintendo Switch. For example, Yuzu executes code that decrypts Nintendo Switch video games (including component files) immediately before and during runtime using unauthorized copies of Nintendo Switch cryptographic keys. Yuzu is primarily designed to circumvent and play Nintendo Switch games. In the ordinary course of its operation with those games, Yuzu requires the Nintendo Switch’s proprietary cryptographic keys to gain access to and play Nintendo Switch games.
4. Developing or distributing software, including Yuzu, that in its ordinary course functions only when cryptographic keys are integrated without authorization, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on trafficking in devices that circumvent effective technological measures, because the software is primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing technological measures. Id. § 1201(a)(2)(A).
but, then, this document appears to be a draft ("proposed final judgement"). so things are still weirdly ambiguous for all the 3rd parties currently dealing with Yuzu :(
Doesn't change the fact that yuzu itself is legal. Last I checked, Judgements don't override law, especially ones drafted by nintendo's crackpot lawyers.
You're assuming Nintendo doesn't file DMCA takedowns; especially considering they've literally just won a court case against it. And even if you are outside the US, I wouldn't be surprised if European service providers don't want to risk it because they are still under copyright treaties, of which the DMCA is just the US implementation.
I don't think it's that simple. For one thing emulation has been ruled legal in the US. By all reports Nintendo had an unusually strong case against Yuzu because the developers behind it didn't sufficiently distance themselves from piracy uses - the opposite if anything.
On the practical side, the fact that the developers were a for profit company also made Nintendo's job much easier.
Taking down a more legally careful, decentralized open source project should prove harder.
> For one thing emulation has been ruled legal in the US. By
Emulation was; breaking cryptographic locks under the DMCA never was. In addition, most of the pro-emulation lawsuits were decided before the relevant DMCA sections even came into effect (e.g. Bleem), and are quite possibly already obsolete.
In order to isolate one part of the software as "the bad bits", you need either clear specific language in the law or a clearly established relevant legal precedent. Neither of these things currently exist in the context of DMCA 1201.
If you're curious, here's the most relevant parts of the text:
> No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that [...] has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;[...]
> As used in this subsection—[...]a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
assuming you aren't a defendant in the above case, then the only ruling which would affect someone who wants to do this is (4):
> Developing or distributing software, including Yuzu, that in its ordinary course
functions only when cryptographic keys are integrated without authorization, violates the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act [...]
so, first reading, no: just taking Yuzu and splitting out the DRM stuff isn't legal if Yuzu still _depends_ on that DRM to function. you could maybe come up with some thing where you do full Switch emulation, with the code having literally zero concept of DRM/cryptography, and can only play homebrew games. do that and some other party would likely come around and do the (likely illegal) work to convert Switch games into a format your emulator understands. quite a bit like MAME cores, really.
fun speculating about how to bypass the spirit of this ruling though, huh? IMO if you actually want to do this don't bother with the roundabout. just do it directly and don't incorporate yourself in a state that cares about DMCA like a dumbass, and strictly distance your operations from your legal identity if you live under such a repressive regime.
> Taking down a more legally careful, decentralized open source project should prove harder.
Oh sweetheart, have you learnt about intimidation by legal fees? Doesn't matter whether it's legal or not, not many can bank to take against dedicated Nintendo legal team.
It's actually much harder for corporations to sue you if all they have on you is a github username.
But once you start taking "donations" and run the project like a business with non-trivial revenue, they can take you down easily by following the money trail.
They did not just win a court case though, they merely settled it outside of court; settling outside of court does not establish any legal precedent one way or another
I don't see how it could establish legal precedent in a way that would be meaningfully useful to Nintendo in other court cases (well, I guess the fact the Yuzu devs settled could scare others into also doing so, but I mean in a legal sense)
Out of court settlements are a thing, but this wasn't one. This was filed in-court. It's like the equivalent of a forfeit.
> Plaintiff Nintendo of America Inc. (“Plaintiff” or “Nintendo”) and Tropic Haze LLC (“Defendant” or “Tropic Haze”), by and through their undersigned counsel, hereby consent to judgment in favor of Nintendo, and jointly move the Court to enter monetary relief in the sum of US$2,400,000.00 in favor of Nintendo and against Defendant.
Translation:
"Hey court, we both agree that Nintendo wins, can we just skip the rest of this and mark this down as a win for them?"
What's the distinction, then ? I can't imagine a company can set precedent to their liking on basically any issue by suing someone who has a vague relation to that issue and doesn't have to money to fight back to get them to sign up to some random settlement that says "the company is right, please set a precedent on this issue. - person who didn't have the money to fight back", right ?
It doesn't set a "precedent" in the strict legal sense, especially that there's no point of law being discussed.
But it does set a "precedent" in that when courts deal with similar cases in the future, they would look back and see the settlement, and it does influence a judges' assessment of whether Nintendo has a case or not, in the sense of "well, the defendants in the prior case forfeited, they must have had an open and shut case, right?"
In a perfect world where courts have all the time and resources to try a case, this shouldn't happen, but in practice courts use all sorts of heuristics (as long as they're not explicitly banned)...
You could probably contest the takedown on the basis that an open-source license allows you to post a fork, but Nintendo got them to agree that the content is illegal, so it seems questionable whether they could give you a license to distribute something it's no longer legal for them to distribute themselves. I wouldn't want to go to court over it, personally.
Nintendo did no such thing. They just settled out of court by owing enough money to bankrupt the company and agreeing to not distribute the work. It means nothing to other people that already have licenses to redistribute from earlier.
People have a license under the GPL to redistribute Yuzu, and the devs know this - I don't think a settlement can compel them to commit perjury (which is what they would be doing if they knowingly lied in a DMCA takedown)
Who exactly is going to start doing very difficult work knowing that they will immediately be sued by an extremely rich company that operates worldwide?
I don't know about immediately. Even Ryujinx, another established Switch emulator that rivals Yuzu and used to be more popular than it, is still up with no news of an incoming lawsuit. This takedown will definitely lessen the number of people who'd want to contribute to the project, but I'm guessing it'll return back to normal as the Switch is discontinued and Nintendo starts losing interest in defending the system.
Could depend. If the next gen console is a Wii > Gamecube type situation, it may be that Yuzu could run games for it with minimal modification, just like how Dolphin can play Gamecube games. That would keep nintendo/their lawyers interested most likely.
Considering the precedent in circumventing decryption issues by calling out to a library (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libdvdcss), what is the likelihood that someone just builds a libxcidecrypt and development of yuzu continues unimpeded on a fork (somewhere like Europe for example where the DMCA doesn't hold)?
Just speculating here, but I'm open to input or counterpoints.
In regards to the term 'lost sales'... are these sales truly even lost? I imagine that if somebody is scrolling through a list of ROMS for games available to download, it's probably a significantly different experience than scrolling through the Nintendo e-shop hunting for a new game to play.
For the ROM list: "oh hey, that looks kinda cool. downloads file"
For the e-shop(same exact game): "looks kinda cool, but not '$40' cool, lol keeps scrolling"
I'd almost play with the idea that ROM emulation could, in some circumstances, increase sales for Nintendo, for example the new console 'Nintendo Foo' comes out, no emulation avenues yet, but a sequel for a game you played on an emulator is only available on the new console. Cha-ching.
'Lost sales' as a reason for litigation doesnt _seem_ to have very stable footing from a logical perspective, albeit I imagine it's only a justifiable means to an end for Nintendo. These little dramas are always so exciting.
You can tell that this was about protecting their hardware sales more than any claims about fair use or copyright or other IP because there are literally hundreds of companies which actively sell handheld systems with thousands of Nintendo brand or licensed ROMs on Amazon and elsewhere and I haven't seen a single one shut down.
Indeed I suspect a large part of the motivation for this lawsuit is the upcoming Switch 2, which will be using essentially the same architecture. A huge part of the necessary work for emulating it has already been done by Yuzu and Ryujinx.
I mean, yes? I'm not sure why you think you've exposed some kind of secret motivation. Yuzu is not the same thing as Dolphin: it's emulating a current console and is very obviously primarily for facilitating piracy, not historical preservation; people arguing otherwise are fucking kidding themselves. Of course it's about Nintendo protecting hardware sales.
Or it's for playing modern games on hardware from this decade. The Switch is now 7 years old, and was dated hardware from the outset.
Plenty of people use Yuzu to play Switch games on hardware that can actually support modern resolutions, or so you can actually achieve decent framerates at modern resolutions.
Dolphin was in development since the GameCube was the "current gen", on through the Wii's lifecycle. Hell, by this point in the Wii lifecycle, it was already on the way out and Wii-U was releasing.
When you find a mirror, you can look for this commit, and know that if the commit hash matches it is probably a legit copy of the repo up until that point at least
commit dc94882c9062ab88d3d5de35dcb8731111baaea2 (HEAD -> master)
Merge: 30567a590 fc6a87bba
Author: liamwhite <liamwhite@users.noreply.github.com>
Date: Tue Feb 27 12:26:26 2024 -0500
Merge pull request #13135 from german77/hid-interface
service: hid: Migrate HidServer to new IPC
Considering the ongoing attacks against GitHub whereby people are creating repos with malicious code, it's probably wise to be bloody careful of any of these yuzu forks. :( :( :(
Just to add my two cents, software repositories like Ubuntu's still have the thing, with the source and the build readily downloadable. Not the latest, but still.
They started deleting repos a couple of minutes ago. I checked a lot of links and they were in the Internet Archive. I'm sure there are plenty of forks of the main repo.
It seems that GitHub still serves the commit history through the existing forks of the repo. According to archive.org, this commit corresponds to the last release of yuzu-mainline before the repo takedown: http://web.archive.org/web/20240304185516/https://github.com...
(It's an issue filed on the yuzu repo by someone claiming to be so upset about yuzu dropping Windows 7 support that they sent emails to Nintendo to bring it to their attention.)
I simply can’t get used to the entitlement of gamers, it’s on a whole nother level. This person writes as if the authors mugged their mother, but the problem is “your emu stopped working on my computer”.
I don't think the intent of posting on a visible, high traffic public space is to only offend the onlookers but to also incite outrage that cascades into other communication channels. Free attention from vitriolic strangers stemming almost solely from lacking self control to the point of expressing frustrated opinions is all they could ever ask for, at a minimum.
Big companies don't wait for some rando to complain to take these kinds of enforcement actions. Chances are it was already well underway by the time he typed up his message.
We saw a similar and opposite situation with Pokemon fans bothering Nintendo to go after Palworld. Considering Nintendo released a statement that boiled down to "we already know", it's clear that whatever Nintendo does or doesn't do has nothing to do with people telling them.
This is sad, but honestly the expected outcome. Not only did they receive money from people, which is like the #1 in the not-to-do list when you're offering a product in a legally grey area, but also they set up a company in the US (TROPIC HAZE LLC), which is like a giant target to be sued. An anonymous GitHub repo is by contrast much harder to sue.
If you're backing up stuff, you should also clone / grab the latest releases for TegraRcmGUI, Hekate, Atmosphère, Lockpick_RCM, NDDumpTool, nxDumpFuse, and TegraExplorer - all of which are also scheduled to be deleted
I had never heard of this emulator before, but after all the news of this lawsuit, I looked at their compatibility list and am surprised at how many titles are supported and how well this seems to work! I'll definitely be giving this emulator a try soon.
I think Nintendo is probably shooting themselves in the foot a little bit by giving this project more publicity than it otherwise would have received.
Not hard at all, development will definitely be continued to some degree but likely not by the original developers, since most of them didn't do a great job of obscuring their identities and won't want to take the risk.
It seems like it's $2.4M from the company Tropic Haze LLC which will probably pay what it can and then declare bankruptcy and close, so that the developers aren't paying $2.4M.
Shoutout to every Nintendo employee who grew up playing Nintendo games on emulators because they couldn't afford them or they weren't available anymore having to stay silent while their employer ensures that never happens again.
All released Nintendo software should be inspected for potential FLOSS license violations and made to cease and desist like they do with emulator developers or at least take them to court.
They go sued because the android version directly competes with how Nintendo switch is played and most likely have a easy to use rom search and install system somewhere
I hate to say it, but I'm mostly on Nintendo's side here.
I love emulators. I love being able to play old games on my PC, and I love being able to play modern Switch games at higher frame rates. However, I just don't think we should ignore the fact that 99% of Yuzu users are pirating the games they're playing.
Maybe you are personally in the 1% of people who dutifully buys every Switch game they play in Yuzu. You are in a tiny minority.
I would feel very differently if Yuzu, say, partnered with a company to create Switch game cart readers that connect via USB, and the software would only load games which were actually plugged in.
> That screws over anyone with a laptop or handheld, who can't just put all their games on a nearby shelf.
It does. That's life. You don't have an inalienable right to play Nintendo games, and this just isn't such an extreme inconvenience. It's far more convenient than the current actually-legal process of tracking down an early model switch and taking the time to mod it and transfer games over, which everyone totally pinky swears they actually do!
> That's life. You don't have an inalienable right
You made up this idea. So no it's not.
> taking the time to mod it and transfer games over, which everyone totally pinky swears they actually do.
Downloading versus ripping yourself is a dumb technicality that most people don't care about. The important part is whether you own the game. That's the part Nintendo actually cares about too.
> Downloading versus ripping yourself is a dumb technicality that most people don't care about. The important part is whether you own the game.
Agreed. I just don't believe that the number of people doing this is more than a rounding error.
Imagine: You hear that a recent update has made Tears of the Kingdom playable in Yuzu! You consider going to your favorite piracy site to grab a copy, but you remember that you need to actually buy a copy first. It would be morally wrong to hit the download button without first ordering your $70 piracy-absolution ticket from Amazon: a box you will never open as you don't own a Switch.
I think there are some people who really do this, but I think it takes a special type of person. I wouldn't be surprised if there were more people who buy Switch games to dump them than buy Switch games as piracy absolution tickets, because at least in the former case, you are physically using your purchase for something. Human psychology is relevant here.
There may be a substantial number of people who bought Mario Odyssey on release to play on their Switch, and downloaded a rom years later to replay in Yuzu. This situation cannot apply to new releases.
> That's the part Nintendo actually cares about too.
Nintendo likely isn't thrilled that people can play their games without buying their hardware even if the games were legitimately purchased, for the same reason Apple cares if people can use iMessage without an iPhone. But that is Nintendo's problem; adversarial interoperability is a good thing.
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Also, you know what, fine, this theoretical USB cart reader doesn't have to stay plugged in. Just plug it in once while running Yuzu, and you can play the copied rom on that machine indefinitely. Put some cryptographic system in place that makes it reasonably difficult to transfer the game validation between machines.
The system does not have to be foolproof; if Yuzu's developers did this, I'm sure there would still be modified builds floating around without that requirement. Yuzu's moral responsibility is merely to ensure that playing a legitimately purchased game is substantially easier than playing a pirated one.
> Nintendo likely isn't thrilled that people can play their games without buying their hardware even if the games were legitimately purchased, for the same reason Apple cares if people can use iMessage without an iPhone. But that is Nintendo's problem; adversarial interoperability is a good thing.
Does the cartridge not count as "their hardware"? I know Nintendo doesn't sell the consoles at a loss but they don't make all that much off it.
iMessage is different because the software is free and Apple builds their brand on the feeling of exclusivity.
The imaginary property maximalist truncheon seems to really be heating up. Too many naive devs following the web startup handbook while not realizing that the aim of their project conflicting with the corporatist status quo means they have to do things much differently. The world can't move on from centralized hellholes like Github (aka Microsoft) and Discord soon enough. It's a damn shame how much development effort has been wasted by these traps, and how much the corporate world has been primed to think anything they don't like can just be bullied away with the legal system. As people move towards freer communications tools that don't just respond to requests to roll over with "how many times?", this entitlement is going to result in demands for ever more draconian Internet restrictions.
not sure if anyone is going to see at this point but I digress.
even if this case did not directly set a precedent against emulation the mere risk of a repeat of this case with the same outcome is not exactly encouraging to the prospect of someone forking the projects at issue and restarting development.
I fully agree with you, except that I stopped buying their stuff after the Gamecube. There are several Nintendo games that I would certainly like to play, but I don't want to be forced to buy their hardware.
ITT everyone missing the point that an open source tool which may or may not have enabled piracy, and may or may not have illegally charged for access to assets which may or may not have allowed users to access pirated assets, had $2.4M on hand to settle with one of the largest software and hardware producers in the world.
> 7. With the exception of paragraphs 5 and 6 herein, the Court further enjoins
> Defendant and its members from destroying, transferring, altering, moving, returning, concealing,
> or in any manner hiding evidence relevant to the matters set forth herein—including any and all
> video game consoles, video games (or constituent elements thereof, such as video game files),
> ROMs, and video game emulators (and any digital files comprising the same) that infringe
> Nintendo’s intellectual property rights, and/or which were used in connection with developing or
> using Yuzu—unless authorized by Nintendo in writing. Defendant and its members are also
> enjoined from allowing evidence to be destroyed, altered, or concealed by third parties if the
> evidence is under Defendant or its members’ possession, custody, or control.
Aaaaand there it is. Nintendo figured out that Yuzu is not clean-room emulation, which is the only legal path to emulation. Reverse-engineering anything from Nintendo is verboten. Developing your own from scratch is not, hence why Dolphin is likely in the clear.
The legality of emulation was strongly upheld under pre-DMCA copyright law in U.S. court decisions where console makers lost against emulator developers.
However, the DMCA gave plaintiffs a whole new set of tools to prevent interoperability. Lots of interoperability and emulation cases have been lost under the DMCA. The DMCA radically limited the prior legal norm that you could create a compatible implementation of a proprietary technology from scratch.
If you agree that there should be a right to reimplement a third-party version of a proprietary system/technology/format/protocol (including one that uses some kind of secrecy to attempt to enforce DRM), you should oppose DMCA §1201.