Nintendo Will Receive $2.4 Million From Emulator Creators
Nintendo has barely filed a lawsuit against the creators of the Yuzu emulator and has already won. The gaming company will receive US$ 2.4 million from the group responsible for Yuzu. The lawsuit, filed in late February, accused Yuzu of infringing intellectual property and encouraging piracy.
With the agreement, the Yuzu team ended the distribution of the emulator’s source code and the disclosure of everything related to the program — such as advertising, hosting the service, or any financial transaction related to Yuzu. The announcement of the agreement and the end of the emulator was released by the creators on the Discord server. The defunct Yuzu website has a note informing the closure of the emulator.
Regardless of what is discussed on the internet about Yuzu being right or not (even more so with the historic Sony vs. Bleem), the truth is that the creators of the show would probably lose the dispute due to the high financial cost. Nintendo has the money to extend the legal battle for months and years, while the $30,000 a month Yuzu received via Patreon wouldn’t pay for the best lawyers in the field for a month.
Soon, the agreement anticipated the inevitable defeat of the emulator. The question is how his team will pay the rest of the compensation. In the case of hacker Gary Bowser, who was fined $10 million, Nintendo will receive 25% of his salary until the amount is paid — yes, Bowser will die before paying off the debt.
Yuzu Creators Acknowledge Piracy
In the note published on Yuzu’s old website, the team acknowledges that the project was mistakenly used for piracy. In the text, the creators say they realize that the emulator’s technology can be used to run games on unauthorized consoles. In theory, the user can emulate a piece of hardware if they have ownership of the device and the games.
However, since almost everything exists on the internet, it is possible to find pirated Switch keys. This was one of the points used by Nintendo in its accusation. In the lawsuit, the company also highlighted Yuzu’s role in the leak of The Legend of Zelda: Tear of the Kingdom.
Yuzu died, but because it’s an open-source project, it didn’t take a day for us to bump into a fork of the emulator while we were doing the research on this text.
