Two of the most high profile emulator projects were wiped out in an afternoon. In the days since, more have followed. The developer of Pizza Boy, a paid Game Boy emulator for Android, pulled it from the shop, writing "I have chosen to prioritize my family over the development of my apps." A 3DS homebrew developer pulled their tools from Github. Android DS emulator DraStic went free, will soon go open source, and the developer says they plan to pull it from the Google Play store at some point.
Legally, the Yuzu settlement sets no precedent. But you can sure as hell feel the chill cast over the whole scene.
. . .
If you buy a Switch, you should be able to dump its encryption keys, and you should be able to study it and write software to reproduce its functions if you have the skill it takes to do so. If you buy a game, you should be able to back it up. If you buy a Kindle book or an iTunes MP3, you should be able to strip that DRM and put it on the device of your choice. So it should be, but the law unfortunately doesn't offer us these clear protections.
. . .
. . . but seeing my own reporting mentioned in the lawsuit reinforced for me how much lawyers will bend any innocuous thing their way to make it sound like proof of guilt. They cited that "in an interview Bunnei game to PC Gamer" ⬆️ he stated Yuzu's developers were aware people were modding Tears of the Kingdom to get it running in the emulator pre-release. I mean... duh? Of course they were aware! How could they not be aware? What are they guilty of, not doing the 'see no evil' pose for two weeks 🙈? The lawyers also claim "thousands of additional paid members of Yuzu's Patreon signed up so that they could download the early access build and play unlawful copies of Zelda: TotK," making it sound an awful lot like Yuzu's developers were updating the emulator to play Tears of the Kingdom pre-release.But they weren't. That didn't happen.
Perhaps all the devs had pirated the game in secret and were getting updates ready for day one, I don't know — but I do know they weren't releasing builds to support it until the release day, no matter what the slippery legal phrasing implies.
This is a warning to emulator devs to maintain some level of anonymity to the point that it is not worth it for Nintendo to go after you.
Want money? Accept donations through Monero, Gift Cards etc.
Moral of the story: don't charge money for your emulator.
Emulation is critical to console and handheld video game preservation and longevity. Charging for the pleasure is legally ill-advised, and antithetical to the cause.
It's perfectly relevant to nearly every other callout in the article. The article also clearly states a claim that Yuzu devs had a Patreon which they were accepting money through, for early access.
Early access version of their own emulator, not the game, it's nothing more than a donation. You'll get the same thing for free if you wait a bit.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. It's still accepting money for an emulator, which is legally ill-advised and antithetical to the cause.
They did as well as anyone could at quashing all discussions of piracy on their official discord, reddit, and patreon. The existence of r/newyuzupiracy (they had no connection to the emulator), while convenient for pirates like me, was extremely bad optics and made Yuzu synonymous with piracy.
Charging money for labor is normal and good, actually. No one bats an eye at virtualboy selling on the Google play store, etc etc.
At least one of the devs literally posted screenshots of them downloading games from gdrive and thanking another member for access to the stash. That's pretty far from quashing all talk of piracy.
Apparently there was a link to a bunch of games/switch OS itself too.
Did not know that. Every time I visited their discord, there were randos and kids without brains that popped up constantly asking about pirated and unreleased games, and every time, they were shouted down or banned quickly.
It seemed exhausting for the mods.
Legally ill advised? Sure.
Antithetical to the cause? Meh. I don't care if the dev charges for early access version of the emulator given there is a public free version of the same. Even if there is not, it shouldnt be an excuse to send them to jail or order them to take the emulator down.
for what its worth the bleempak tried to do a similar thing except properly commercial and won its original court case. sony then buried the company in legal fees to ensure non-competition with dreamcast emulatuon.
see sony lawsuit at the natopedia link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem!#Bleemcast!
Love the goalpost move there. "Don't charge money" has very quickly become "accepting money". Accepting money and charging money are entirely different things.
There's no goalpost, this isn't a competition. Let me clarify my message then:
Don't involve money with your emulator.
I think the reason yuzu got targeted so hard is because modern smartphones were becoming powerful enough to emulate switch games. If anyone with a higher end Android phone made in the past few years (which many people already have) can just slap a controller on it and get the same handheld experience as those with an actual switch, Nintendo's business model would take a significant hit. And the switch successor is also planning on using the same architecture, so there's an element of future proofing here.
