The court has reached a judgement in Nintendo’s lawsuit against Tropic Haze, which develops the Yuzu Switch emulator. The judgement finds that “Yuzu is primarily designed to circumvent and play Nintendo Switch games,” and has issued a permanent injunction forcing its creators to cease all involvement with or distribution of the emulator.
Tropic Haze has been ordered to pay Nintendo $2,400,000 in damages, as well as immediately ceasing to develop, promote, or distribute Yuzu or any of its associated software or source code. The developer will also have to close down its website and any social media presence, including its Discord server, and will have to surrender the yuzu-emu.org domain name to Nintendo.
3DS emulator Citra is also affected by this judgement–while not explicitly named in the court documents, the emulator was created by the same people behind Yuzu, who are now barred from working on any project that infringes on any of Nintendo’s copyrighted games or operating systems.
The creators of Yuzu have put out a statement on its social media pages, with the statement also replacing all content that was previously on its websites. The statement apologizes for enabling piracy of Nintendo’s games, stating that was never its intention.
“Piracy was never our intention, and we believe that piracy of video games and on video game consoles should end,” the statement reads. “Effective today, we will be pulling our code repositories offline, discontinuing our Patreon accounts and Discord servers, and, soon, shutting down our websites.”
