Taking things for granted and giving certain gray-area products more attention than they need to keep them in the spotlight. That's kinda what I pulled from the text. Could be wrong though.
Yeah I can understand that, it's definitely the reason why some fan games get take downs (the moment they get talked about on websites like Kotaku or whatever, you know they're done). That's why I would give some of the blame to repackers, I've known people downloading that shit without even knowing what an emulator was. Tho they mostly used Ryujinx for that because it would work better than the free Yuzu branch.
So to me, it's mostly because Yuzu was just making a lot of doubloons otherwise they probably would have went for Ryujinx at the same time. I don't think that « the average pirate » is really an issue. You can make any emulator you want and ask for some donations, just don't build a business over it. I find it irrelevant to blame the average pirate when, as far as I'm concerned, Yuzu just got too close to the fire.
Pretty sure both Yuzu and Citra had free builds in their respective repositories last I checked. Based on my understanding of why Nintendo went after the company of Yuzu, I didn't see anything about certain builds being paid only being an issue (maybe I missed it), the premise seemed to revolve around circumvention of security measures, allowing piracy (emulators don't, piracy is the cause of the user at their own discretion, but I digress), though it was also made a point that leaks and shit happened and people misused emulators and such for them, which they aren't wrong, people did do this. Maybe on one hand going after an emulator for people's actions seems dumb, I mean logically going after the source (which isn't the emulator) of the issue seems more sound, but I also know that if you take away a means for people to abuse what they get their hands on, it can still stir the pot just the same, just from a different angle. It still sets a precidence, a sign if you will of maybe calming down on the abusive behavior on the pirated contents.
Citra doesn't have the same « issue » than Yuzu did.
Yes, Yuzu did had a free build, but it was the « stable » branch and the early access branch was the one that would receive day one updates at the same frequency as Ryujinx, except you had to subscribe to their patreon to have access to it.
There was many ways to have access to those without paying, but I remember one time I wanted to ask for some support on their discord, and because it was about the early access build, they asked me to link my patreon to Discord so I can have the role, basically proving I paid for it.
That's why they were able to get 26,500$ when I checked a few hours ago before they take down their account. At one point it was more than 30k.
Ryujinx has barely enough to have a single develop to work full time on it. That's because subscribing to their patreon only support the project, they don't put any branch of Ryujinx under a paywall, unlike Yuzu.
That's why I'm saying that was most likely the main issue and brought Nintendo's hammer (they basically built a business model around emulation, where Ryujinx doesn't even tho they get some money, peanuts compared to what Yuzu was making). Otherwise I don't see why they wouldn't have gone for both Yuzu and Ryujinx at the same time.
Official document of the settlement
