Nintendo Switch and 3DS emulators are shutting down, Nintendo will pay $2.4 million

Nintendo won the battle before it even started. Reached an agreement with Tropic Haze, creators Nintendo Switch, Yuzu emulators and Nintendo 3DS, Citra emulatorswhere he gets everything he asked for. The emulators will disappear and you will receive a compensation of $2.4 million.among other things.

A few days ago, Nintendo filed a lawsuit against the creators of Yuzu, a Nintendo Switch emulator, for “promoting piracy on a colossal scale.”

An emulator is an application that clones the functioning of other software or hardware using reverse engineering. That is, it does the same thing, but in a different way. In this case, Yuzu lets you play Nintendo Switch games on PC.

Goodbye Yuzu and Citra emulators

Emulators are legal because they don’t copy anything, but do the same thing in a different way. But in some cases There are two steps that put them in a legal gray area..

To use a console emulator with commercial games, Requires BIOS or firmware, a digital version of its operating system. In case of games, convert your cartridges or discs into a digital file called ROM

. And in both cases this implies violate anti-piracy measuresto make both copies.

For decades, console emulators have navigated this gray area. They are vital to preserving old cars.like the MAME emulator does for arcade machines from the 70s and 80s.

Many of these machines no longer exist or are in the hands of collectors and museums, but thanks to emulators, fans and researchers of video game history can try them out and see what they were like.

Thanks to more modern machines Emulators are also vital for preserving digital games that disappear when online stores close.as happened with the Nintendo 3DS or Wii digital stores.

In many cases, rights holders turn a blind eye when these machines are no longer sold and are considered heritage items that become part of video game culture. But The Yuzu emulator is a different story, as it emulates a console that continues to sell in volume, such as the Nintendo Switch..

Its creators explain that their goal was never piracy, but to be able to play the games everyone buys on the Nintendo Switch on PC to get higher resolutions and higher frame rates. But, as usually happens in such cases, Many people downloaded games from the pirated site and played them on PC using the Yuzu emulator without going through the checkout..

This is undoubtedly an economic loss for Nintendo, but it may be more concerned about PC and Switch comparisons with games emulated at 8K resolution and mods to improve graphics quality. And above all this many games were leaked days before their launch

and pirates played them on PC, creating spoilers, and legal buyers had to wait for release day

Yuzu does not include the console BIOS or ROM., this is something that users must “achieve” on their own. Thus, the company had a legal basis to challenge Nintendo in court. He did not explain the reasons why he did not do this.

Against, reached an out-of-court settlement with Nintendowhich is essentially a complete surrender without any conditions.

Tropic Haze strives close Yuzu immediately, as well as another Nintendo emulator he developed, Citra, which emulates the Nintendo 3DS console. In addition, it will pay Nintendo compensation in the amount of $2.4 million.

Also will remove all tools for copying console and game BIOS, such as TegraRcmGUI, Hekate, Atmosphère, Lockpick_RCM, NDDumpTool, nxDumpFuse and TegraExplorer. They are closing their Patreon, GitHub, and Discord accounts.

Submitted by Nintendo website yuzu-emu.orgwhich is no longer working and he vows to never work on anything related to Yuzu, Citra or Nintendo content ever again.

On your Discord channel Emulator developer Bunnei confirms agreement: “I am writing to inform you that Citra’s support for Yuzu and Yuzu will be discontinued effective immediately. The Yuzu team has always been against piracy. We started the projects in good faith, out of our passion for Nintendo, its consoles and games. and we meant no harm.

He continues: “But we now see that because our projects can bypass Nintendo’s technological protections, they have led to widespread piracy. We were deeply disappointed when users used our software to leak game content before its release. experience for legitimate buyers.

The big question is to know What will happen now to other emulators that emulate Nintendo machines that are no longer sold?. Will Nintendo continue its offensive or stop there?

After reaching an out-of-court agreement, Yuzu and Citra emulators will disappear, and their creators will pay Nintendo a $2.4 million fine. The Japanese company draws a line: it will not allow emulators that are still on sale to be used to hack its platforms. Let’s see if he intends to expand this line or not…