(Image via Reddit / r/yuzu)

Staff Writer: Brian Galindo

Email: bgalindo@umassd.edu

Yuzu was the biggest Nintendo Switch emulator just a few weeks ago. At the end of February, though, Nintendo of America filed a suit against them, claiming their services as unlawful and promoting piracy. 

Within a week of the suit, Yuzu’s parent company, Tropic Haze, settled, paying Nintendo over $2 million in damages and deleting all traces of the emulator. Tropic Haze also posted a message to their Discord, disowning the service and Citra, a Nintendo 3DS emulator they created.

The catalyst for the suit was in early 2023 when the hugely anticipated The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was pirated en masse before its release. With such an anticipated title, Nintendo was outraged by the piracy and blamed emulators, specifically Yuzu.

In the official complaint, Nintendo of America described an emulator as “a piece of software that allows users to unlawfully play pirated video games that were published only for a specific console on a general computing device.”

Video game emulation is playing a game on hardware it was not designed for. Sometimes, this is done by the company that owns the console to make old content playable on a new system, like Nintendo’s Virtual Console. Most commonly, though, this is done by the gaming community to make the games more accessible, especially on a computer.

Many supporters of Yuzu cited the 2000 case of Sony Computer Entertainment America, Inc. v. Connectix Corporation. In this case, Connectix’s emulator of Sony’s PlayStation was seen as protected by free use.

The difference between that case and this one is simply the difference in technology. The PlayStation was a much simpler console—it could be remade essentially one-to-one on the computer. The Switch, however, is an incredibly complex system. Each piece of software for the device includes one or several encryption keys, which should make it impossible to play unless on the official hardware.

The Yuzu emulator undermined those encryptions. Their website even went so far as to include how to undermine those encryptions so the player could use their software to play any game they had access to.

Though the intent of the Yuzu team seemed to be for it to be for the sole use of emulating games already owned by the player, they did not do a good enough job of ensuring their methods did not help in the prevention of piracy.

Many people wonder why people would emulate if not for piracy’s sake. There are a few reasons for emulation beyond playing games without buying them.

An emulated game can be modified in ways that physical copies cannot. If it can be modded, emulation offers a safer, much less permanent risk if the modifications make the game unplayable.

Another reason for emulation is video game preservation. As time goes on, more and more systems become obsolete, and therefore, no more content is made for them. This means that their content will be lost if the physical console is destroyed. Emulation ensures the content won’t be destroyed by an accident or, worse, something beyond one’s control.

With that said, Yuzu may not have been used for the first reason, and with the Switch still being a new system, the second reason was obviously not its purpose either. One can follow how Nintendo concluded they did and filed a suit.

The takeaway from this situation is that emulation is a contentious subject, and one should tread carefully when doing so. Sometimes, you have to ask: Is this Super Mario Odyssey mod worth $2 million?