Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu officially shuts down in settlement with Nintendo

UPDATE 2:40 PM CST: The GitHub repository for Citra, a Nintendo 3DS emulator supported by Tropic Haze, is now offline.

UPDATE 1:30 PM CST: Yuzu's GitHub repository is now offline.

Yuzu, a popular Nintendo Switch emulator, has officially been shut down.

This comes as part of a settlement reached between Tropic Haze, LLC (the developers behind Yuzu) and Nintendo. Nintendo filed suit against Tropic Haze last week, claiming the emulator encouraged the piracy of Nintendo Switch games, particularly The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

The proposed settlement, published today, stipulates that the Yuzu developers have to pay Nintendo $2.4 million in damages. Additionally, a permanent injunction has been filed against Tropic Haze, prohibiting the developers from "offering to the public, providing, marketing, advertising, promoting, selling, testing, hosting, cloning, distributing, or otherwise trafficking in Yuzu or any source code or features of Yuzu."

The developers also cannot work on any project related to the circumvention of "Nintendo’s technical protection measures, including without limitation by using unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s proprietary cryptographic keys to decrypt Nintendo’s video games (or component files)."

Yuzu's website (yuzu-emu.org) and its associated assets and domains will also be surrendered to Nintendo. As of press time, the website was still up and running, and download links for Yuzu were still active.

Lastly, Tropic Haze and its employees, members, and associated parties must hand over any and all "physical circumvention devices" (i.e., hardware), "video game consoles, video games (or constituent elements thereof, such as video game files), ROMs, and video game emulators (and any digital files comprising the same) that infringe Nintendo’s intellectual property rights, and/or which were used in connection with developing or using Yuzu."

In other words, the Yuzu developers have to hand over anything and everything that might remotely be related to the development of the product. All code, websites, hardware, games, software, and anything else that might be associated with Yuzu's development will have to be surrendered to Nintendo.

Keep in mind that this settlement is only a proposed final judgment. Some of the terms may change before final approval by a judge. However, it's unlikely any radical changes will be made before the final judgment is accepted.

Nintendo has not yet released comments on the proposed settlement.

On its Discord server, the Yuzu team stated the following:

Hello yuz-ers and Citra fans: We write today to inform you that yuzu [sic] and yuzu's support of Citra are being discontinued, effective immediately. yuzu and its team have always been against piracy. We started the projects in good faith, out of passion for Nintendo and its consoles and games, and were not intending to cause harm. But 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. Thank you for your years of support and for understanding our decision.

It should be noted that Yuzu is an open-source project, meaning its codebase was made accessbile to the public for review and development. As of press time, it is still available on GitHub.

Yuzu is the second Nintendo Switch emulator to cease development after pressure from Nintendo. Skyline, another Switch emulator developed for Android, halted development due to "potential legal risks." Another Nintendo Switch emulator, Ryujinx, appears to still be under active development.

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