For a while now I have been more positive towards piracy and emulation since after seeing how all these remastered games are bad and cost way more than the original was, and the fact that some games will just never have an official localization after like 20+ years. Then it makes sense to play it on your computer at a better performance than on the console itself.

All the games, movies, and other media is trash now and the good ones will never never see the light of day on a service, but the companies question why everyone is getting the media on torrent sites now rather than dropping bucks on a mid service or game.

Most video game companies now don’t care about emulation anymore since its going to happen no matter what and some court cases ensured it was legal to do. Except for Nintendo which seeks to destroy it all for themselves while killing the fun for everyone else.

Right now they won big after suing the creators of the Yuzu emulator for 2.4 million dollars because their games were being emulated too early.

The Verge

Just over a week ago, Nintendo sued the developers of the leading Nintendo Switch emulator, Yuzu, for “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale.” Now, it appears that Yuzu will give up without a fight — and give Nintendo everything it wanted. And it affects the Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra, too.

According to a joint filing, Tropic Haze has not only agreed to pay $2,400,000 to Nintendo but also says Yuzu is “primarily designed to circumvent and play Nintendo Switch games.” The company agrees to be permanently enjoined from working on Yuzu, hosting Yuzu, distributing Yuzu’s code or features, hosting websites and social media that promote Yuzu, or doing anything else that circumvents Nintendo’s copyright protection.

Oh, and it will surrender the yuzu-emu.org domain name to Nintendo, agree to delete not only its copies of Yuzu but also “all circumvention tools used for developing or using Yuzu—such as TegraRcmGUI, Hekate, Atmosphère, Lockpick_RCM, NDDumpTool, nxDumpFuse, and TegraExplorer,” and hand over any “physical circumvention devices” and “modified Nintendo hardware” to Nintendo. It also agrees to not delete any other “evidence” that infringes Nintendo’s IP rights.

Yuzu and Citra developer Bunnei confirmed in the Yuzu discord that both the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo 3DS emulators are affected. “We write today to inform you that yuzu and yuzu’s support of Citra are being discontinued, effective immediately,” it begins:

Hello yuz-ers and Citra fans: We write today to inform you that yuzu and yuzu’s support of Citra are being discontinued, effective immediately.

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 authorized 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.

Nintendo didn’t even care that people who download these emulators use other games. The fact it was made to emulate their console which involves their games being a priority it was gone overnight and the creators are bankrupt.

Other companies will see this and do it to anyone that dares circumvent their bullshit they force upon games.

The only saving grace is that emulators will always come back with every one that Nintendo sued into the ground. The grave of Yuzu will arise another that will probably be better. Or they just keep the remaining version of yuzu alive.

Emulation will never die, but the Switch online will.