Ryujinx emulator taken down after devs reach agreement with Nintendo

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In what could possibly be the worst way to start October for emulation enthusiasts, as of just a few minutes ago the Ryujinx repository appears to be down, with the usual "404" message being given when trying to enter any of their related GitHub pages. Not even the main Ryujinx developer account seems to be active.

Currently there hasn't been any official reports as to why this occurred. None of the official social media accounts for the emulator have given any response, nor has any of the developers talked about why the repository is down, but we'll be sure to keep you updated whenever any new developments towards this situation are known.

UPDATE #1: Given the nature of the page being down with a 404 message, it's possible that this could be related to the removal of the Ryujinx account, and not a DMCA. If the repository suffered from a DMCA claim, then the DMCA notice would appear when entering the repository. However, that is not the case, and the DMCA listings from GitHub doesn't have any recent entries for Ryujinx.

UPDATE #2: The Ryujinx Discord server has paused invites for the moment, and additionally, one of the Discord mods posted the following message:
"To clarify, it's not a DMCA, it's not an issue with GitHub. Please wait for further information and refrain from spreading misinfo thanks."

UPDATE #3: According to an official statement on Ryujinx's Discord server, developer gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and they were offered an agreement to stop working on the emulator project, and while the agreement wasn't confirmed yet, the organization has been entirely removed.

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UPDATE #4: According to other devs, the developer was not only contacted, but actually tracked down by Nintendo to his location, and pressured to developer to cease and abandon development altogether for the emulator.

This marks now the 2nd and only main remaining Switch emulator that Nintendo has taken down as of today, and without any proper and clear protection when it comes to emulation and preservation down the road, it's likely that Nintendo will continue on its efforts to bring down emulation as a whole.

:arrow: Ryujinx GitHub Repository
 
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Ok, so how the actual fuck could Nintendo enforce a C&D in Brazil as a Japanese company? Unless everyone was wrong in that Yuzu thread about Brazilian laws, and it's more similar to the laws of the USA when trying to sue someone foreign, wouldn't Nintendo have a miserable time trying to enforce any sort of legal binding/lawsuit?
If it was just a threat to C&D their Github and their Patreon, then they could've reuploaded it somewhere else like what Sudachi did (and ppl would've flocked to whatever payment method they decided to go to if their Patreon was removed because the Yuzu situation would've still been fresh)
 

Crystal_tofu

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Anyone else find it odd this happened right after Eow got leaked, kinda like what happened with Totk & yuzu? Call me crazy but this seems a bit too suspicious, but who knows, I sure don't my IQ's been confirmed to be - 45
 
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NyaakoXD

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The sad reality is: While the emulator itself isn't illegal, the biggest issue nowadays is people having very easy access to illegally pirate games and using the emulator to play them. It also doesn't help that the Switch and its games are still being actively sold and not truly dead yet, so makes sense Nintendo would go hard after Yuzu and Ryujinx, especially when they're being shared around the web that they can run leaked early copies of big games days before release day, like TOTK and EoW.
 

YuriBrando

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Anyone else find it odd this happened right after Eow got leaked, kinda like what happened with Totk & yuzu? Call me crazy but this seems a bit too suspicious, but who knows, I sure don't my IQ's been confirmed to be - 45
I think that this could be likely, since nintendo did mention on the lawsuit against yuzu that Zelda Totk got pirated at least more than 1 million times on PC, the game got leaked 10 days before the official launch already running on yuzu, they are seeing emulation now as a big threat for their profits
 
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Crystal_tofu

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The sad reality is: While the emulator itself isn't illegal, the biggest issue nowadays is people having very easy access to illegally pirate games and using the emulator to play them. It also doesn't help that the Switch and its games are still being actively sold and not truly dead yet, so makes sense Nintendo would go hard after Yuzu and Ryujinx, especially when they're being shared around the web that they can run leaked early copies of big games days before release day, like TOTK and EoW.
I think that this could be likely, since nintendo did mention on the lawsuit against yuzu that Zelda Totk got pirated at least more than 1 million times on PC, the game got leaked 10 days before the official launch already running on yuzu
I'm glad i am not crazy, people call me a nintendo fangirl for thinking this but truth is i'm aware of nintendo's often questionable business decisions, however it's becoming pretty clear that people pirate newer games as a way to bite back, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that this in itself might make things a million times worse than it already is, two wrongs don't make a right, and if one decides to pirate switch games i personally don't care but i expect them to be aware of the potential consequences of blabbering about it publicly online.
 

LexDG

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I'm glad i am not crazy, people call me a nintendo fangirl for thinking this but truth is i'm aware of nintendo's often questionable business decisions, however it's becoming pretty clear that people pirate newer games as a way to bite back, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that this in itself might make things a million times worse than it already is, two wrongs don't make a right, and if one decides to pirate switch games i personally don't care but i expect them to be aware of the potential consequences of blabbering about it publicly online.
This is what happened with Vimm and anyone with a brain saw it coming. As soon as delta and retroarch came to ios, people started posting videos and screenshots of the site EVERYWHERE. That was the very obvious beginning of the end for a site that had been around with zero drama for DECADES.

So yes, of course the leak of a brand new game being highlighted on a giant forum with a discussion below about the best way to play it was gonna accelerate things. So everyone who was pissed at the idiots who kept talking about vimm should turn their rage to everyone here who talked about the emulator BEING THE BEST WAY TO PIRATE A GAME AND EXACTLY HOW, AND be livid with gbatemp for having absolutely zero issue with the blatant piracy best practice summit happening in the comments while pretending that not sharing a link to the game itself was enough to keep their noses clean. ALL discussion about a pirated game should have been immediately shut down. Period. Not doing so muddies the stance of this forum on piracy and the actual intent of emulation.
 
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Crystal_tofu

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This is what happened with Vimm and anyone with a brain saw it coming. As soon as delta and retroarch came to ios, people started posting videos and screenshots of the site EVERYWHERE. That was the very obvious beginning of the end for a site that had been around with zero drama for DECADES.

So yes, of course the leak of a brand new game being highlighted on a giant forum with a discussion below about the best way to play it was gonna accelerate things. So everyone who was pissed at the idiots who kept talking about vimm should turn their rage to everyone here who talked about the emulator BEING THE BEST WAY TO PIRATE A GAME AND EXACTLY HOW AND WHY AND gbatemp for having absolutely zero issue with the blatant piracy best practice summit happening in the comments and pretending that not sharing a link to the game itself was enough to keep their noses clean. ALL discussion about a pirated game should have been immediately shut down. Period. Not doing so muddies the stance of this forum on piracy and the actual intent of emulation.
While i get your point, even if the topic of piracy was stopped entirely on this forum it wouldn't stop it anywhere else, GBAtemp isn't a sole entity that causes an emulator to be shut down because a bunch of people in a thread announcing that a game was unfortunately leaked preach about a current gen console emulator being the best way to pirate video games, the best you can do is ignore those type of people especially if you know very well they're wrong, call me a bootlicker but this site does a great job shutting down on people looking to pirate as you'll find many members stating that they will not help them on obtaining an illegal copy of a game as that makes sense because why would you? If people want to pirate that's cool, however i don't condone it because that's got nothing to do with me, but it's a bit mad to drag down an entire site because of actions that outsiders have done, yet even after everything said here you have actual sites sharing roms and socials like Twitter and Discord where people actively have underground piracy hoards yet this place is where you draw the line? Crazy.
 
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LexDG

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While i get your point, even if the topic of piracy was stopped entirely on this forum it wouldn't stop it anywhere else, GBAtemp isn't a sole entity that causes an emulator to be shut down because a bunch of people in a thread announcing that a game was unfortunately leaked preach about a current gen console emulator being the best way to pirate video games, the best you can do is ignore those type of people especially if you know very well they're wrong, call me a bootlicker but this site does a great job shutting down on people looking to pirate as you'll find many members stating that they will not help them on obtaining an illegal copy of a game as that makes sense because why would you? If people want to pirate that's cool, however i don't condone it because that's got nothing to do with me, but it's a bit mad to drag down an entire site because of actions that outsiders have done, yet even after everything said here you have actual sites sharing roms and socials like Twitter and Discord where people actively have underground piracy hoards yet this place is where you draw the line? Crazy.
I’m not putting the SOLE blame on GBAtemp. Not at all. But that thread has over 36 thousand views. And it’s linked to and referenced in other places. The reality is that the pirates win when the discussion isn’t shut down. And while a give MAJOR credit to this site for shutting down any links to games, they gotta do better with discussions of leaks. Period. Any conversation that links emulation to piracy should be shut all the way down and that didn’t happen here. They simply didn’t help the situation.
 
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YuriBrando

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I'm glad i am not crazy, people call me a nintendo fangirl for thinking this but truth is i'm aware of nintendo's often questionable business decisions, however it's becoming pretty clear that people pirate newer games as a way to bite back, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that this in itself might make things a million times worse than it already is, two wrongs don't make a right, and if one decides to pirate switch games i personally don't care but i expect them to be aware of the potential consequences of blabbering about it publicly online.
Yeah, i think that people(including also the yuzu and ryujinx devs) did cross too much the line with making the games run or playable before the official launch, i was already predicting that zelda totk and echoes of wisdom (which are basically new games of one of the most important nintendo franchises) situation wouldn't end well, with the games being playable even before the official launch on emulators, they should have put measures to block commercial games who got leaked earlier from being playable on the emulator.
 

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I don't think it has to do with EoW's leak otherwise it would have happened with ToTK or other big games. Leaking or not, the simple fact that these emulators were there is enough for Nintendo.
There's probably the announcement for the Switch 2 that's coming this month, it's nothing but an opportunity for Nintendo to appear tough.
I don't see how it's their fault if games are leaking, if they are playable because the software is well-made ... I don't see why making their software worse intentionally would have helped. Leaks already weren't officially supported, when they couldn't run you had to try your luck with unofficial patches, neither yuzu or ryujinx would work on supporting leaked games.

I don't know where this assumption that they got shut down because of EoW working early is coming from. They most likely were already targeting Ryujinx right after they dealt with Yuzu.

To me, it seems a bit obvious that they just didn't want them to be around when the Switch 2 launches as they were afraid that they could use their knowledge to make an emulator for it.

Now, because Yuzu and Ryujinx pretty much got C&D, does it mean that it's « illegal » to fork or use their code as a base ? Because that could be the argument Nintendo will be using if anyone tries to use either of these as a base. But they will most likely don't care and C&D anything that even remotely looks like an emulator
 

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Now, because Yuzu and Ryujinx pretty much got C&D, does it mean that it's « illegal » to fork or use their code as a base ? Because that could be the argument Nintendo will be using if anyone tries to use either of these as a base. But they will most likely don't care and C&D anything that even remotely looks like an emulator
In Yuzu's case, it might be problematic. The team made a lot of dangerous moves that would've probably caused the court to agree with at least some of Nintendo's arguments if they had continued the case. And apparently, they did officially admit guilt as part of their settlement. I'm still not entirely sold that this directly establishes that Yuzu is indeed illegal software without a judge actually saying it is, but its code is pretty dangerous to use.

Ryujinx should be safer. There never was any kind of lawsuit, so it hasn't actually been established that it violates any laws. That said, it does still offer the ability to decrypt ROMs, which was an argument Nintendo made in the Yuzu lawsuit for it being DRM circumvention software. I'm not well-versed in the Switch scene, so I don't know what reason there was for establishing the tradition that ROMs should be dumped and shared encrypted, with the matter of decryption being left to the emulators. Feels like it may have been safer to design emulators to expect pre-decrypted ROMs. Nintendo could have still gone after decryption tools (which would have had little need for updates and therefore wouldn't have been impacted much if their development was terminated, as long as they remained in circulation somewhere), but the same argument shouldn't have applied to the emulators themselves, if my understanding is correct. Maybe the ROMs still need to be encrypted to run on modded hardware? It's the only good reason I could think of.
 
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MasterJ360

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Anyone else find it odd this happened right after Eow got leaked, kinda like what happened with Totk & yuzu? Call me crazy but this seems a bit too suspicious, but who knows, I sure don't my IQ's been confirmed to be - 45
No not at all. Why? B/c we have idiots that would showcase the game using Ryu on Youtube.
 

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