Switch emulator Yuzu is in Nintendo's crosshair

Armenius

Armenius

Extremely [H]
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They say that it illegally circumvents software encryption and "facilitates" piracy. I'm not sure about the first argument, but the second has been shot down in courts before. The highlighted section in the second screenshot should lead to an automatic dismissal. On the circumvention of encryption, as far as I know Nintendo's lawsuit against Dolphin on that front went no where.

https://x.com/stephentotilo/status/1762576284817768457
https://nitter.poast.org/stephentotilo/status/1762576284817768457

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Axman said:
Then Yuzu doesn't help piracy flourish.
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In the space of Switch piracy its the tool nearly everyone is using (there is another popular one, fwiw). Its silly to think its existence and popularity isn't contributing to more people attempting to pirate Switch games.
 
criccio said:
In the space of Switch piracy its the tool nearly everyone is using (there is another popular one, fwiw). Its silly to think its existence and popularity isn't contributing to more people attempting to pirate Switch games.
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If it goes away will the other tool replace it?
 
Axman said:
If it goes away will the other tool replace it?
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Up to them, but then Nintendo can go after them too.

I don't really see what the big deal is here, everybody knows a large amount of people don't own the games they're playing on these emulators. Its not exactly a secret, just not popular to discuss outside of certain communities. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
 
criccio said:
Ah, brick wall, I see.
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No. Tell me how Yuzu makes piracy flourish, when their existence doesn't affect piracy.

The only entity that contributes to piracy, with or without Yuzu, is Nintendo.

The reason people pirate Nintendo games is because Nintendo makes games.
 
Axman said:
No. Tell me how Yuzu makes piracy flourish, when their existence doesn't affect piracy.

The only entity that contributes to piracy, with or without Yuzu, is Nintendo.

The reason people pirate Nintendo games is because Nintendo makes games.
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I don't understand why this is complicated. It they shutdown the most popular methods for people to play these games they didn't buy, less people would bother trying to acquire them. Nintendo is never going to solve piracy, but its their job to do whatever they can to constantly fight it and this is something they can do. (and clearly are trying)
 
criccio said:
It they shutdown the most popular methods for people to play these games they didn't buy, less people would bother trying to acquire them.
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Can Nintendo wipe the internet of their games?
 
I don't think there's any denying people are using it to play pirated games.

But I don't see how this has any hope at all of having any success. The tool itself is legal and the user is ultimately the one that needs to source the keys and data to get it running.
 
criccio said:
I don't understand why this is complicated. It they shutdown the most popular methods for people to play these games they didn't buy, less people would bother trying to acquire them. Nintendo is never going to solve piracy, but its their job to do whatever they can to constantly fight it and this is something they can do. (and clearly are trying)
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Nintendo is trying to argue that the existence of the emulator is facilitating the act of piracy. Piracy is illegally copying and distributing games. The Yuzu developers are not distributing illegally copied games, nor are they creating dumping tools to make copies of games, so they are not facilitating piracy.
vegeta535 said:
Didn't Nintendo try in the past with other emulators and fail?
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They tried to go after Dolphin for including the Wii encryption keys, but there has been no news of that lawsuit since it was filed last year. The maintainers of Dolphin made a lengthy post explaining why they were not worried about it. It's just typical Nintendo lawfare trying to see what sticks.
 
I was going to post this in News, because this is a big case that, if Nintendo is not fully defeated, has significant negative repercussions in terms of precedent. To put it succinctly from what we've seen thus far, it does not appear that Nintendo has a strong case but nothing is guaranteed when it comes to technological nuance, vast corporate wallets, and other factors interacting with today' court system. Many hypothesize that Nintendo may be simply attempting to bankrupt Yuzu's team on legal fees to encourage them into the sort of restrictive settlements they've tried on others in the past to kill varying fan game projects and the like. If nothing else, they may be hoping that so long as the suit has been followed, Yuzu's team will not be working on/updating Yuzu in any way (perhaps even other emus devs will be wary to update too) and will also take Switch emu knowledgable devs out of commission for when they announce and perhaps by the end of theyear release the "Switch 2".

In any event, its important that Yuzu's team is given proper support for potential legal battles ahead. Its outcome effects emulation and game preservation itself (Nintendo claims that playing a Switch game on anything BUT a Switch is a copyright/IP violation), encryption and format switching (Nintendo claims that the prodkeys/titlekeys files necessary are illegally acquired and that Yuzu somehow 'breaks encryption" as in the DMCA. None of this is true, that's a separate step with a separate tool, but they assert that if an emu has a bios, or keys of any sort that its somehow piracy to format shift), the ability for a Free Software and open source project to accept donations (Nintendo claims that not only are their users primarily pirates, Yuzu having a patreon whereas a $5 donation gets you a compiled version of the early access build, is an intention to profit / charge for piracy. Its worth mentioning that the mainline builds are freely available compiled an in code, as required by the GPLv3 license. Users can also make the EA version themsleves by taking mainline and merging all the pull requests marked EA, and compile it themselves - or get it from someone else who did this very thing. This was one reason that despite refusal to support unofficial versions, Yuzu devs never attempted to shut down a popular repository where someone did just that thing and releeased an unofficial EA version at parity with the official one , a completely legitimate use under GPLv3. ).

So there's a lot going on, but Nintendo's litigious actions are unfortunate. If they spent half the amount of effort and money they do on attempting to squash these projects on instead porting games and supporting their hardware for use on PC , they'd profit greatly.
 
yeah i thought they already tried this and got shot down because they arent including any firmware/bios/rom data.
 
I think there is a case here, with Yuzu.

Yuzu has linked to and/or provided directions on how to get the keys needed to make emulation work. Which legally speaking, is not legal.

They also worked on a "freeshop", which would allow download of games and also attempt to work with Nintendo's online services, to enable live patching, netplay, other live features. They advertised their work on this and probably got more patreon revenue, because of it.
They did not ever launch it. I'm sure someone finally realized how stupid it would have been for them to do that.

Yuzu is also open source and has always been more about getting specific games to work, rather than general emulation of the Nintendo Switch. There have probably been some times when Yuzu teams messaging about being able to play certain games, hasn't exactly been in good faith. And even if not-----the open source nature means anyone can take the existing Yuzu and patch it to make specific games work. Including leaked, pre-release games. Which are usually locked out of play, on a real Switch, until release day.

Ryujinx emulator, on the other hand, is about generally, accurately emulating the function of a Switch. And as long as their messaging has been tight, they can probably exist in a gray area.

There are probably some other nuances.
 
How would it be illegal for you to do something to a device you physically own? Where's the line - should it be illegal to root your phone? Violating a EULA isn't a guaranteed criminal offense.
 
The whole compensation BS numbers thing... "Well, the game was downloaded 1 million times, that means if they could not of downloaded it, they would of gone out and bought it so we are owed 1 million copies worth of financial compensation" ...ugh...morons
 
chameleoneel said:
I think there is a case here, with Yuzu.

Yuzu has linked to and/or provided directions on how to get the keys needed to make emulation work. Which legally speaking, is not legal.
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They have only provided directions of how to use open source (from its own repository, not hosted by Yuzu) applications in order to extract them from your own Switch.
chameleoneel said:
They also worked on a "freeshop", which would allow download of games and also attempt to work with Nintendo's online services, to enable live patching, netplay, other live features. They advertised their work on this and probably got more patreon revenue, because of it.
They did not ever launch it. I'm sure someone finally realized how stupid it would have been for them to do that.
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I'm not aware of an "freeshop" connection to Yuzu , especially with their vehement antipiracy stance in chat and elsehere. As far as a Nintendo Switch Online type service, there was a very short announcement- maybe only a few days - they were going to be beta testing an alternative online play network and, because they needed verified user accounts the first ones would be those who already had regitered IDs by means of being Early Access patreon backers...but this never happened as they discontinued development and announced it shortly. Anyone who signed up for Yuzu's patreon specifically for that would likely have been able to discontinue their subscription before it would even propagate for the next month's charge etc. Honestly its too bad they didn't develop a NSO online play alternative, but creating a replacement network is not some sort of legal violation - https://pretendo.network/ for example is working on a Nintendo Network emulator for 3DS and Wiiu while https://wiimmfi.de/ does the same for the Wii's Nintendo Wii Fi Connection
chameleoneel said:
Yuzu is also open source and has always been more about getting specific games to work, rather than general emulation of the Nintendo Switch. There have probably been some times when Yuzu teams messaging about being able to play certain games, hasn't exactly been in good faith. And even if not-----the open source nature means anyone can take the existing Yuzu and patch it to make specific games work. Including leaked, pre-release games. Which are usually locked out of play, on a real Switch, until release day.
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There's always a discussion between pure accuracy and performance/usability additions etc...when it comes to emulators, but the latter are not considered legally more dangerous, all other things being equal - its just a different way to go about certain things. I'm not aware of any 'bad faith" engagement given the Yuzu team seems pretty consistent that anyone coming in to ask "where can I get game X" is always told "buy it, then dump it from your Switch" and the like. As far as its open source nature, that's one of its strengths but regardless it cannot play a "pre-release" title of any sort, if you mean an encrypted pre-ordered title that has not been "unlocked". The discussion about "pre-release / leaked" titiles come instead usually from broken street date leaks, usually physical - like a game being sent to a retail location a week advanced of the launch date so that it can be checked in and employees can put the boxes out at the proper time, yet one of said employees takes a copy home for themselves. If they use a modded switch (or even a stock one that's offline at most; maybe not even that ) they can play the game as it exists on the install medium perfectly and/or dump its contents to upload onlline same as any other game. So clearly, Yuzu is not capable of magically getting around or enabling users to play pre-release titles; in fact, its required that they be dumped from a Switch in the first place! Atop that, the Yuzu team has in several cases advertised that any questions about or support for a known leaked title by the methods I described above, are prohibited so they've seemed consistent on that.
chameleoneel said:
Ryujinx emulator, on the other hand, is about generally, accurately emulating the function of a Switch. And as long as their messaging has been tight, they can probably exist in a gray area.

There are probably some other nuances.
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I don't think Ryujinx is necessarily more accurate or complete an emulator. They're both good projects and have their strengths and weaknesses in emulation, features, other variations (ie Ryujinx is coded in C# , Yuzu is C++ etc) . One reason that Ryujinx wasn't targeted (so far) is likely because the popularity of Yuzu and most notably its Patreon account is significantly larger. This came about for a variety of reasons including being first to the scene with a viable FOSS emulator, continually updated, and able to play commercial titles, as well as other minutia of development factors leading to, especially early on, sometimes a better user experience (ie Yuzu was first to enable Vulkan, certain shader features like async compilation etc). The Patreon is a major factor in Nintendo's claim an though Ryujinx would be equally "guilty" in this regard, the larger target is no doubt first in their mind. One place where they do differ is that unlike Ryujinx , Yuzu offered a beta testing newest version called "Early Access" compiled for Patreon subscribers. The "mainline" release of Yuzu was always available in code on Github and compiled for many prominent OSes. However the EA version was compiled only for those at the $5 Patreon tier as a testing branch. Note that it was NOT a paywall - a user could decide they would do as Yuzu's devs themselves did and grab the code for the mainline + add alll the marked "Early Access" incusion pull requests, and then compile it themselves. Alternately, they could pick it up from another user that did just that; famously a site called PinEApple released "unofficial" builds of EA for everyone and nobody, not the Yuzu devs, tried to shut them down for it as it was well in line with the GPLv3 license - Yuzu was compelled to provide the code but did not have to give compiled versions for every branch if they didn't want, but nor could they stop others from compiling and making it available. Its also worth mentioning that it wassn't like the Yuzu team rarely updated the 'mainline' branch or held features back for a long time in order to encourage donations for easy access to the EA version - the mainline was updated with frequency.

Ultimately both of them are open source Switch emulators that have grown to a significant if not perfect state of usability, features, and accuracy and it is this that continues to frustrate Nintendo. In fact, one of their biggest complaints in the suit is that merely the ability to play Switch games on anything but a Switch is in their mind, a copyright violation! Ironically, the'd have less to worry about if they'd just also release games native for PC, but in any case they're simply trying to see if this will scare the Yuzu team (and anyone watching) enough to stop, or otherwise lock up development especially with the presumptive annoucement of the Switch 2 on the way.
 
Absalom said:
Yuzu owner's caved 🙁 It was over before it started:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/4/24090357/nintendo-yuzu-emulator-lawsuit-settlement
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I don't think he caved so much as their lawyer probably just said "you're fucked."

edit: or they knew it'd just get dragged until Nintendo's infinite wallet outlives theirs, in which case they've blown their own legs off for no net-gain.

I guess it was either their monetization that fucked them, or something in communication that proved they were playing loose with keys (like telling someone to just go download them). They also put builds behind Patreon as an incentive to pay/profit. I'm sure this will lead to someone trying weird shit like selling plushies and shit as a front for funding their emulator.
 
socK said:
I don't think he caved so much as their lawyer probably just said "you're fucked."

edit: or they knew it'd just get dragged until Nintendo's infinite wallet outlives theirs, in which case they've blown their own legs off for no net-gain.

I guess it was either their monetization that fucked them, or something in communication that proved they were playing loose with keys (like telling someone to just go download them). They also put builds behind Patreon as an incentive to pay/profit. I'm sure this will lead to someone trying weird shit like selling plushies and shit as a front for funding their emulator.
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It's definitely lawfare. Nintendo's lawyers probably threatened a long drawn out legal battle.

Note that this affects Citra, too, which is one of the only viable 3DS emulators out there. Repositories for Yuzu are down already, but I think Citra is still up. You can otherwise download the repository for Citra from other places still.
 
Citra links still live:

2/28/2024 Nightly and Canary builds (use the "usersdrive" links):
https://www.emucr.com/2024/02/citra-git-20240228.html

3/4/2024 Nightly build:
https://archive.org/details/citra-nightly-2104

Citra fork that is still live on GitHub (for source code):
https://github.com/PabloMK7/citra

Yuzu source code including last commits on GitHub:
https://archive.org/details/yuzu-source

For Yuzu builds there are too many being uploaded right now to sort through which ones are legit. If somebody knows better than I do, feel free to share.
 
The Mad Atheist said:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8kk4d5MKe0
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this is dumb and i'm embarrassed i even contributed a view to it

any site that actually published one of these IT LIVES ON BEHOLD THE COMMUNITY CARRYING THE TORCH articles is utter garbage because this is the most blatantly grifty shit that anyone can see in 4 seconds of looking.

literally just dozens of commits of some kid struggling to update the readme and various text files. there is no development.

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clearly knows what he's doing
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also comically, they violated the license of the original software by deleting the original notice.
 
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