Nintendo files lawsuit against popular Switch emulator Yuzu

Popular Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu recently became accessible to a whole lot more users thanks to its still-under-development Android port. However, Nintendo doesn't seem too pleased about Yuzu and has sued the software maker. The information comes from veteran games journalist Stephen Totilo, who posted an excerpt of the lawsuit on X.

In the lawsuit, Nintendo claims "A video game emulator is a piece of software that allows users to unlawfully play pirated video games that were published only for a specific console on a general-purpose computing device," insinuating emulators facilitate piracy. It added that emulators like Yuzu allowed players to play The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (curr. $54 on Amazon) a week before launch. An early build of the game was supposedly downloaded over 1 million times and many "pirate websites" endorsed Yuzu as their platform of choice. You can read the entire lawsuit on Scribd.

It'll be interesting to see how the whole saga plays out. Strictly speaking, emulators are not illegal in the United States based on a precedent set by the Sony vs Connectix lawsuit of 1999, where Sony tried to shut down a PS1 emulator. For the most part, Yuzu should be in the clear here because it encourages users to bring over their legally purchased games/BIOS/prod.keys from a modded switch console, even though it is fairly easy to find those online. Should Nintendo get its way and get Yuzu shut down, there are plenty of alternatives such as Ryujinx that will fill the void.