CheckMag | Ryujinx and Yuzu have bitten the dust, and Nintendo was right to shut them down
Nintendo has been, and still is, fiercely protective of its intellectual property. It must have a legal team the size of a small country and has sued fan projects such as the Super Mario 64 port, YouTubers who show emulated content, websites that host their ROMs, Switch modders and even other developers. Add in the fact that they constantly re-sell their back catalogue, then shut down the stores for older consoles, thus forcing people to buy the same games over and over again and it’s not hard to see why Nintendo gets plenty of hate.
The Switch launched in 2017 and was an easy candidate for emulation due to its woefully underpowered ARM-based processor (Tegra X1) which was extremely outdated, having first appeared in the Nvidia Shield a full 2 years earlier.
Barely a year after its release, in 2018 and within a month of each other, both Ryujinx and Yuzu launched. Switch emulation development moved fast, thanks to the well-documented ARM architecture it was based on and the fact that the first generation Switch had a hardware flaw that meant it could be dropped into recovery mode with little more than a paper-clip.
By the end of their run, both Ryujinx and Yuzu were capable of emulating pretty much any Switch game thrown at them, on relatively low-powered hardware. This made modern handhelds like the Steam Deck (available on Amazon.com) ideal Switch stand-ins. Who would buy a Switch when you can get a Steam Deck for only slightly more money and play both PC games and Switch games?
Emulators have long fallen into the grey / legal area of the law. They are technically legal, however, many gather unwanted legal attention as Chinese manufacturers continue to profit by selling handhelds loaded with ROMs. In the case of Yuzu and Ryujinx, users are expected to source both the firmware and cryptographic keys themselves (which are certainly not legal), but neither of these emulators is supplied with any proprietary code, putting them firmly into the “legal” area, despite this never being challenged in court.
Historic examples of corporations trying to shut down emulators are few and far between, largely for the reasons above but also because most emulate systems that are no longer sold, or are operated by companies that don’t have a distribution platform for their older titles. However, two examples include Sony’s case against Connectix - Virtual Game Station and Bleem! both of which released while the original Playstation 1 was on sale, and both of which notably would only play original disks. Although, “modded” versions of Connectix - VGS did make it into the wild.
Despite this, Sony was successful in getting both shut down, but neither platform shuttered due to a court order. VGS was ultimately bought out by Sony itself, then vaporised. Bleem! crumbled under the legal costs of going up against Sony. Both cases offer parallels to Ryujinx and Yuzu in terms of legal threats and competing against hardware that was (at the time) available for sale.
Regardless of emulators themselves being deemed legal, and the fact that it is the users themselves that have to source the “illegal” part of the package that makes everything work, as the movie business has repeatedly shown, going after the users doesn’t work.
Which ultimately leaves the emulators themselves in the cross-hairs. The financial pressure alone in facing a giant like Nintendo as historically proven is enough to force developers to cease and desist - unfortunately, never allowing them to have their day in court to fight for the legal rights of emulation software.
If you completely ignore Nintendo’s turgid history with its fanbase and imagine it as a mom-and-pop company releasing their first game console, how would it look if 12 months after their first release, a piece of software showed up that effectively eliminated the need to buy any hardware from them, or any games. Even if the intended use case is not piracy, the fact that it “can” be used for piracy means that ultimately, some people will.
It’s almost impossible to put any figures on the total loss of sales for Nintendo. Loss of sales for hardware and software probably won’t make much of a dent in Nintendo’s revenue anyway, and let’s be honest - most people pirating software aren’t going to openly admit it. But the fact that this was even an option while the product is still on sale is going to draw attention.
Fortunately, as the internet has repeatedly shown, chopping a couple of heads off a hydra is not going to make much of an impact in the long run. The years of hard work from the developers of Yuzu and Ryujinx are the most significant casualties. Nevertheless, no matter how much they are hated among the community, or how healthy their bottom line is, companies like Nintendo shouldn’t have to compete with solutions that reverse engineer their products and offer them for free, at least within the active lifecycle of the hardware. In the eyes of the law, emulating games not owned by the player amounts to stealing, and in a world increasingly dominated by digital stores even "ownership" is a loose term.
It has yet to be determined what these cases may mean for emulation as a whole, but ultimately emulation should be about preservation; about enabling young and old alike to remember and enjoy the games from long retired systems that shaped the gaming industry. Games that can be purchased at the local Walmart do not need to be preserved immediately.
The work that people put into emulation makes a significant contribution to gaming history and preservation, but it shouldn't be used as a piracy tool, especially when the product it is emulating is still actively selling. Ryujinx and Yuzu facilitated piracy for many people, whether that was the intention or not. This is what got the two projects, as well as the teams behind them, eradicated.
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