Nintendo recently filed a lawsuit against Tropic Haze, developers of Yuzu, an open-source Nintendo Switch emulator, and have since come to a mutual agreement, with Tropic Haze having to pay $2.4 million in damages, cease all operations, and “destruct all copies of Yuzu”.

Big deciding factors included that certain aspects of Yuzu were only obtainable via Patreon, so money had to exchange hands, as well as the fact that over 1 million downloads of Tears of the Kingdom happened before the game released, with the assumption that those downloads were to be played on the emulator.

Here’s some of Nintendo’s claim:

Defendant and its agents are fully aware of the use of Yuzu by others in performing circumvention, and in facilitating piracy at a colossal scale.

Yuzu’s website acknowledges that the Nintendo Switch’s decryption keys are required to decrypt games and includes links to software that unlawfully extract those keys from the Nintendo Switch.

Via Metro

OatmealDome on Twitter/X (via Dcubed on our forums) shared the link to the full details, which can be found here.

Yuzu, in its current form, will cease to exist. Their settlement with Nintendo prohibits any distribution of yuzu in built and source code form.

Development must also stop.

The yuzu website and related services will also be shut down.

Here’s the final message from Tropic Haze on their Discord server (via MSN):

‘Yuzu and its team have always been against piracy. We started the projects in good faith, out of passion for Nintendo and its consoles and games and were not intending to cause harm. But we see now that because our projects can circumvent Nintendo’s technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorised hardware, they have led to extensive piracy.

‘In particular, we have been deeply disappointed when users have used our software to leak game content prior to its release and ruin the experience for legitimate purchasers and fans.

‘We have come to the decision that we cannot continue to allow this to occur. Piracy was never our intention, and we believe that piracy of video games and on video game consoles should end.

‘Effective today, we will be pulling our code repositories offline, discontinuing our Patreon accounts and Discord servers, and, soon, shutting down our websites. We hope our actions will be a small step toward ending piracy of all creators’ works. Thank you for your years of support and for understanding our decision.’