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Tag: Yuzu

  • Nintendo blitzes GitHub with over 8,000 emulator-related DMCA takedowns

    Nintendo blitzes GitHub with over 8,000 emulator-related DMCA takedowns

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    Nintendo sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice for over 8,000 GitHub repositories hosting code from the Yuzu Switch emulator, which the Zelda maker previously described as enabling “piracy at a colossal scale.” The sweeping takedown comes two months after Yuzu’s creators quickly settled a lawsuit with Nintendo and its notoriously trigger-happy legal team for $2.4 million.

    GamesIndustry.biz first reported on the DMCA notice, affecting 8,535 GitHub repos. Redacted entities representing Nintendo assert that the Yuzu source code contained in the repos “illegally circumvents Nintendo’s technological protection measures and runs illegal copies of Switch games.”

    GitHub wrote on the notice that developers will have time to change their content before it’s disabled. In keeping with its developer-friendly approach and branding, the Microsoft-owned platform also offered legal resources and guidance on submitting DMCA counter-notices.

    Nintendo’s legal blitz, perhaps not coincidentally, comes as game emulators are enjoying a resurgence. Last month, Apple loosened its restrictions on retro game players in the App Store (likely in response to regulatory threats), leading to the Delta emulator establishing itself as the de facto choice and reaching the App Store’s top spot. Nintendo may have calculated that emulators’ moment in the sun threatened its bottom line and began by squashing those that most immediately imperiled its income stream.

    Sadly, Nintendo’s largely undefended legal assault against emulators ignores a crucial use for them that isn’t about piracy. Game historians see the software as a linchpin of game preservation. Without emulators, Nintendo and other copyright holders could make a part of history obsolete for future generations, as their corresponding hardware will eventually be harder to come by.

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    Will Shanklin

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  • Makers of Switch emulator Yuzu quickly settle with Nintendo for $2.4 million

    Makers of Switch emulator Yuzu quickly settle with Nintendo for $2.4 million

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    Tropic Haze, the popular Yuzu Nintendo Switch emulator developer, appears to have agreed to settle Nintendo’s lawsuit against it. Less than a week after Nintendo filed the legal action, accusing the emulator’s creators of “piracy at a colossal scale,” a joint final judgment and permanent injunction filed Tuesday says Tropic Haze has agreed to pay the Mario maker $2.4 million, along with a long list of concessions.

    Nintendo’s lawsuit claimed Tropic Haze violated the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). “Without Yuzu’s decryption of Nintendo’s encryption, unauthorized copies of games could not be played on PCs or Android devices,” the company wrote in its complaint. It described Yuzu as “software primarily designed to circumvent technological measures.”

    Yuzu launched in 2018 as free, open-source software for Windows, Linux and Android. It could run countless copyrighted Switch games — including console sellers like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, Super Mario Odyssey and Super Mario Wonder. Reddit threads comparing Switch emulators praised Yuzu’s performance compared to rivals like Ryujinx. Yuzu introduces various bugs across different titles, but it can typically handle games at higher resolutions than the Switch, often with better frame rates, so long as your hardware is powerful enough.

    Screenshot from the Yuzu emulator website showing a still from Zelda: Breath of the Wild with a blueprint-style sketch of the Nintendo Switch framing it. Dark gray background.

    A screenshot from Yuzu’s website, showing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Tropic Haze / Nintendo)

    As part of an Exhibit A attached to the proposed joint settlement, Tropic Haze agreed to a series of accommodations. In addition to paying Nintendo $2.4 million, it must permanently refrain from “engaging in activities related to offering, marketing, distributing, or trafficking in Yuzu emulator or any similar software that circumvents Nintendo’s technical protection measures.”

    Tropic Haze must also delete all circumvention devices, tools and Nintendo cryptographic keys used in the emulator and turn over all circumvention devices and modified Nintendo hardware. It even has to surrender the emulator’s web domain (including any variants or successors) to Nintendo. (The website is still live now, perhaps waiting for the judgment’s final a-okay.) Not abiding by the settlement’s agreements could land Tropic Haze in contempt of court, including punitive, coercive and monetary actions.

    Although piracy is the top motive for many emulator users, the software can double as crucial tools for video game preservation — making rapid legal surrenders like Tropic Haze’s potentially problematic. Without emulators, Nintendo and other copyright holders could make games obsolete for future generations as older hardware eventually becomes more difficult to find.

    Nintendo’s legal team is, of course, no stranger to aggressively enforcing copyrighted material. In recent years, the company went after Switch piracy websites, sued ROM-sharing website RomUniverse for $2 million and helped send hacker Gary Bowser to prison. Although it was Valve’s doing, Nintendo’s reputation indirectly got the Dolphin Wii and GameCube emulator blocked from Steam. It’s safe to say the Mario maker doesn’t share preservationists’ views on the crucial historical role emulators can play.

    Despite the settlement, it appears unlikely the open-source Yuzu will disappear entirely. The emulator is still available on GitHub, where its entire codebase can be found.

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    Will Shanklin

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  • Nintendo Asks Valve To Kick GameCube And Wii Emulator Off Steam, Says It’s Protecting Its Creativity And Work

    Nintendo Asks Valve To Kick GameCube And Wii Emulator Off Steam, Says It’s Protecting Its Creativity And Work

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    Valve removed the Steam listing for Dolphin, a popular emulator for the GameCube and Wii, after it received a cease and desist from Nintendo, developers behind the project claim. The company behind Mario and Zelda accuses the emulator of illegally circumventing its protections, and says it’s merely protecting the “hard work and creativity of video game engineers and developers.”

    What You Should Know About Mario Strikers’ Big Free Update

    A listing for Dolphin on Valve’s digital storefront first appeared back in March. “We are pleased to announce our great experiment—Dolphin is coming to Steam!” the creators wrote at the time. While the open-source project has been available online for years, interest in retro emulators has increased since the release of the Steam Deck, and an official store page would make the tool even easier to access.

    On May 27, however, Dolphin’s developers announced the Steam port would be “indefinitely postponed” after Valve removed the listing following discussions with Nintendo. “It is with much disappointment that we have to announce that the Dolphin on Steam release has been indefinitely postponed,” the emulator team wrote in an update on the project’s blog. “We were notified by Valve that Nintendo has issued a cease and desist citing the DMCA against Dolphin’s Steam page, and have removed Dolphin from Steam until the matter is settled. We are currently investigating our options and will have a more in-depth response in the near future.”

    According to a copy of the legal notice reviewed by PC Gamer, Nintendo accuses Dolphin of using “cryptographic keys without Nintendo’s authorization and decrypting the ROMs at or immediately before runtime.” While emulation is itself legal, providing users with ways to bypass protections on individual game ROMs could potentially violate Nintendo’s intellectual property rights. It’s an issue that would have to be hashed out in court, though the power imbalance between large corporations and homebrew projects like Dolphin means that rarely actually occurs.

    “Nintendo is committed to protecting the hard work and creativity of video game engineers and developers,” a spokesperson for Nintendo told Kotaku in an email. “This emulator illegally circumvents Nintendo’s protection measures and runs illegal copies of games. Using illegal emulators or illegal copies of games harms development and ultimately stifles innovation. Nintendo respects the intellectual property rights of other companies, and in turn expects others to do the same.”

    While the company has rarely looked the other way when it comes to piracy of its games and the tools that could facilitate it (like mod chips sold online), Nintendo has been particularly aggressive lately in clamping down on leaks and what it believes to be illegal misuses of its games and technology. In February it subpoenaed Discord for the personal information of someone suspected of leaking the official The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom art book. In April it issued multiple copyright strikes against dozens of popular Breath of the Wild gameplay videos on YouTube that relied on modded versions of the game. And in May it seemingly had a Switch emulation tool, Lotpick, removed from Github after illicit copies of Tears of the Kingdom began spreading like wildfire online prior to the game’s official release.

    It’s not yet clear how Dolphin’s current developers will respond, or how willing Valve will be to bring the store page back unless the matter is resolved in court, which could take years. Last year, Valve accidentally included the Switch emulator Yuzu in its YouTube trailer for the Steam Deck. The video was later edited and re-uploaded to remove the reference. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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    Ethan Gach

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