Yuzu emulator abruptly settles lawsuit with Nintendo for $2.4 million

Last week, Nintendo filed a lawsuit against the Switch emulator Yuzu, blaming the emulator for piracy of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and claiming that there is no legal way to use Yuzu to play Nintendo Switch games. In response, the developers of Yuzu hired a lawyer, seemingly setting the stage for the first legal showdown over emulation in more than 20 years. However, Yuzu and Nintendo filed a joint motion to settle the suit, with the Yuzu developers agreeing to pay Nintendo $2.4 million in monetary relief. As a result of the settlement, development of Yuzu will be shut down and distribution will cease.

It is a dramatic turn of events for a case that was not certain to go in Nintendo's favor. Sony's early 2000s lawsuits against emulators from Connectix and Bleem! both went in favor of the emulator developers, but advances in technology since then leave a big question mark about how a court would rule on circumventing the Switch's encryption, which is broadly forbidden by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Nintendo claimed that Yuzu is "primarily designed to circumvent technological measures," indicating that the emulator runs afoul of the DMCA. It is possible that a judge would rule that circumvention is not the primary purpose of the emulator, just a necessary act of reverse-engineering to play videogames. Such a judgment would be a huge win for the legality of emulation of modern systems, while a judgment that went Nintendo's way would threaten many other emulators. A loss could have been extremely expensive for the Yuzu developers, and even a win may have resulted in years of legal fees as the case made its way through the trial and appeal process. Apparently, the emulator developers decided that a quick settlement was a safer choice.

In the joint motion, the Yuzu developers acknowledge that the award of monetary relief bears a reasonable relationship to the range of damages, attorney's fees, and full costs that the parties could have anticipated would be awarded at and following a trial of this action. As part of the settlement, the Yuzu developers waive any right to appeal the judgment and are bound by a permanent injunction that essentially marks the death of the emulator, at least in its current form. The injunction prevents the developers from offering Yuzu to the public, providing it, marketing, advertising, promoting, selling, testing, hosting, cloning, distributing, or otherwise trafficking in Yuzu or any source code or features of Yuzu. It also requires the defendants to cease using the domain Yuzu-emu.org and transfer it to Nintendo's control, and to carry out the destruction by deletion of all circumvention devices, including all copies of Yuzu and all circumvention tools used for developing or using Yuzu to the extent they can. Essentially, Yuzu is about to be wiped from the internet officially.

In a post on the Yuzu Discord, lead developer Bunnei announced that Yuzu and Yuzu's support of Citra are being discontinued immediately. The statement continues with language that gives off strong "we have to say this as part of the legal settlement" energy, stating that "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."

Although Yuzu's source code has been removed from Github, it is likely that archives have already been made and shared among the emulation community. It is possible that other developers not associated with the project will carry on Yuzu's work under a new name, but it seems likely that the $2.4 million settlement will have a chilling effect on any future development that is likely to draw Nintendo's ire.

The question now is whether Nintendo's decisive victory here will lead to lawsuits against other emulators, including Yuzu competitor Ryujinx. Because Nintendo and Yuzu settled before going to trial, the decision has no legal repercussions.