Nintendo targeted 401 Switch emulator repositories through GitHub’s fork-network rule

Nintendo continues its campaign to remove Nintendo Switch emulators. The company has aggressively taken down 401 Nintendo Switch emulator repositories on GitHub, with 311 belonging to a specific project: the Nintendo Switch emulator Suyu.

First reported by TorrentFreak, Nintendo filed seven DMCA takedown notices on GitHub in a coordinated effort this week, effectively wiping out 401 repos that were forks of Nintendo Switch emulators, mostly Suyu forks.

311 of those repos belonged to the Suyu project, a C++ rewrite that picked up emulation and preservation efforts after Nintendo took down Yuzu following a 2024 lawsuit against the project.

Leveraging GitHub's fork-network rule to devastating effect

Just a few DMCA complaints filed on GitHub by the Japanese gaming company against parent repository fork trees wiped out subsequent forks under GitHub’s fork-network rule.

From what we know so far, Nintendo hasn’t taken the team or developers behind the project to court, and the company might have settled the matter privately.

GitHub’s DMCA policy has a specific condition for this kind of system, which caused a cascading shutdown of repos. When a complainant alleges that a parent repository’s fork infringes copyrighted content to the same extent as the original content, GitHub steps in and processes takedowns against the entire tree in a single go instead of going after each repo individually.

This isn’t a theory or hypothetical situation: GitHub took down a network of 4,195 repositories in response to a notice from Tencent, and a previous Nintendo notice in February followed the same clause and removed 218 repositories.

Nintendo's legal stance on the matter

Nintendo’s legal argument focuses less on the emulator code and more on how Nintendo Switch games are encrypted. Each Nintendo Switch game is locked behind proprietary cryptographic keys internally known as prod.keys, which the console must apply before a game can boot.

According to Nintendo, the emulators circumvent Nintendo’s TPMs (Technology Protection Measures) by using illegal copies of the keys. The notice rests on the 2024 lawsuit, where Nintendo stated that distributing the tool isn’t merely hosting infringing material but trafficking in it.

This particular framing has been through court twice. Nintendo of America v. Tropic Haze LLC resulted in a permanent injunction in March 2024 after Tropic Haze, creator of the Yuzu emulator, settled and paid $2.4 million.

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