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Yuzu emulator shutting down, paying Nintendo 2.4 million in lawsuit settlement

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Just last week, on Tuesday, February 26th, 2024, news broke out about the Yuzu emulator team being sued by none other than Nintendo themselves, with Nintendo claiming that the emulator apparently allowed users to play certain games early (due to street dates being broken) and also allowing piracy of the current Nintendo Switch system.

Today, in a rather surprisingly quick manner, it seems like Tropic Haze LLC., the company behind the Yuzu team, has reached a settlement with Nintendo in regards to the lawsuit. According to a recent official document uploaded just a few minutes ago, Tropic Haze will pay up 2.4 million USD in favour to Nintendo, with both parties agreeing in the settlement and its amount.

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UPDATE: According to the proposed Final Judgement and Permanent Injunction document, Yuzu as a whole in its current form will cease to exist, meaning no further development and prohibition of any distribution of built or source code forms of it.

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:arrow: Official document of the settlement
:arrow: Final Judgement and Permanent Injunction
 
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So what does this mean for the source code, legality-wise? Is it illegal now for anyone to develop anything derived from it? Or can people who weren't part of the Yuzu team still do something with it as long as they don't call it Yuzu?
 
Sir Tortoise said:
Emulation is legal, and it's illegal to facilitate piracy. Both can be true. The overlap between the two is a grey area, it's not like the legal use is a shield for anything but itself. Yuzu was just very openly positioning itself on the piracy side, making it an easy target.
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I would like an official statement more than anything. Highly unlikely we will ever get one. What was Yuzu facilitating that others were/are not? Was it the quickstart guide? If the Patreon was a major problem, why didn't Ninty go after CEMU some years ago? Not really a fan of speculation for this, but it seems that's all we have?
 
Kioku said:
I would like an official statement more than anything. Highly unlikely we will ever get one. What was Yuzu facilitating that others were/are not? Was it the quickstart guide? If the Patreon was a major problem, why didn't Ninty go after CEMU some years ago? Not really a fan of speculation for this, but it seems that's all we have?
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Because the Wii U was a failing console.
 
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Kioku said:
I would like an official statement more than anything. What was Yuzu facilitating that others were not? Was it the quickstart guide? If the Patreon was a major problem, why didn't Ninty go after CEMU some years ago? Not really a fan of speculation for this.
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We don't really know for sure. It's probably NDAs blocking info coming out as well.

WiiU stopped production October 21, 2013 and CEMU was released 13 October 2015. So I don't think Nintendo really cared for it.
 
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linuxares said:
We don't really know for sure. It's probably NDAs blocking info coming out as well.

WiiU stopped production October 21, 2013 and CEMU was released 13 October 2015. So I don't think Nintendo really cared for it.
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CEMU was a way to emulate BOTW, though, so its still a good point. Ultimately I don't think enough people really knew what a WiiU was or that there was a WiiU version of BOTW for it to make a dent but I do remember the internet discourse in 2017 that BOTW and Switch were dead in the water for sales because the only big game it had was emulateable day 1 and we all know how that turned out.
 
Honestly, settling was probably the best and worst decision for the Yuzu devs. They could've either gone through a long and drawn court case that could've bled them dry and potential remove the current precedent set for emulation or they could accept the loss of the emulator. They chose the latter at a great cost.
Yuzu is open source so I suspect a fork will be made in due time but it's not any more upsetting.
That being said, to confirm, paid Emulators are legal, guys. That's not why they went after Yuzu specifically. Otherwise, they would've gone after other Emulators that accept donations as well. Nintendo specifically abused an untested part of the DMCA system to get this to happen. DMCA is just a total clusterfuck in the US so I'm not surprised.
 
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James_ said:
The main yuzu repositories on GitHub have now been taken down.

View attachment 423840

(note: some repositories still remain but the emulator stuff is gone gone)
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Dang, I got the latest Windows & Android builds but I was away from my Steam Deck so I didn't get it for Linux. Whoops.

Hopefully I can find the latest Linux build eventually, or someone can share it. Last known update was about 3 hours ago for Windows, 17 hours for Android.
 

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