A court has ordered that the makers of a Switch emulator cease development, and give Nintendo $2.4m in damages.
Like Mario jumping on a Goomba, Nintendo’s legal effort to halt the production of a Switch emulator has been swift and effective. A court in Rhode Island has found in Nintendo’s favour, and has ordered that development on the emulator, called Yuzu, be ceased down immediately.
As reported by Gamespot, the company behind the emulator, Tropic Haze, has also been ordered to hand over $2.4m in damages to Nintendo, and will be unable to develop any similar kinds of software in the future.
Taking to Twitter/X, the makers of Yuzu released a statement, announcing that both Yuzu and Citra – a 3DS emmulator “are being discontinued, effective immediately.”
The team argued that it has “always been against piracy,” adding, “we started the projects in good faith, out of passion for Nintendo and its consoles and games, and were not intending to cause harm.”
The US court found, however, that Yuzu “is primarily designed to circumvent and play Nintendo Switch games,” and “violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on trafficking in devices that circumvent effective technological measures.”
Nintendo’s lawyers previously asserted that The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom had been downloaded from “pirate sites over one million times” before the game was released, and laid the blame for that piracy at the feet of Tropic Haze. Given another recent court case, in which a hacker was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay Nintendo $10m, the makers of Yuzu are perhaps lucky that the settlement figure wasn’t higher.
