(Photo by Emanuele Cremaschi/Getty Images)
Yuzu, the popular Switch emulator for the PC, is shutting down, a week after Nintendo filed a lawsuit in the US, accusing its developers of facilitating piracy.
Rather than fight the lawsuit, Yuzu's team of developers apparently decided it had no choice but to give into Nintendo’s demands, resulting in a settlement, according to court documents. Yuzu will pay Nintendo $2.4 million and surrender the yuzu-emu.org domain. Developers will also stop distributing the open-source emulator to the public.
In a statement, the Yuzu team said it never developed the emulator to violate Nintendo’s intellectual property, but the company's lawsuit forced them to reckon with the “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,” Yuzu said. “We have come to the decision that we cannot continue to allow this to occur.”
In response, the Yuzu team is shutting down all operations, including pulling its code repositories on GitHub and discontinuing its Patreon accounts, where the team received about $28,000 in crowdfunding per month. “We hope our actions will be a small step toward ending piracy of all creators’ works,” the developers added.
Yuzu emerged in 2018 as a way for Switch owners to play their games on Windows and later Linux and Android. But last week, Nintendo's lawsuit revealed the company had been amassing evidence against Yuzu on claims the emulator was allowing users to pirate virtually any Switch game. This allegedly included helping gamers pirate The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom "over one million times" before the title was officially released.
Despite the settlement, Yuzu’s code will likely live on. The project was open source and freely distributed over the internet, making it easy for other users to distribute and modify. In addition, Ryujinx, another open-source Switch emulator, remains available.