Nintendo is suing the creator of a Nintendo Switch emulator, and claims in its lawsuit that Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom was pirated over a million times.
Much like Disney, Nintendo has its cute, fluffy side, but also a harder, litigious edge capable of financially ruining those who get on the wrong side of it.
Nintendo’s latest lawsuit is against the creator of Yuzu, a piece of software that emulates the Switch. The suit came to light thanks to journalist Stephen Totilo (via Gamespot), who shared some court documents related to the case on Twitter/X.
The documents state that the case is against Tropic Haze LLC, the company that developed Yuzu, and argues that the firm knowingly facilitates “piracy at a colossal scale.”
A preliminary statement written by Nintendo’s lawyers reads, “Yuzu’s website acknowledges that the Nintendo Switch’s decryption keys are required to decrypt games and includes links to software that unlawfully extract those keys from the Nintendo Switch.”
One key line, meanwhile, asserts that The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom was “successfully downloaded from pirate websites over one million times before the game was published and made available for lawful purchase by Nintendo.”
These are serious claims, particularly given Nintendo’s insistence that Yuzu’s creators knew the software was being used to play pirated games.
To get an idea of how expensive this could get if Nintendo wins, look no further than the case of one Gary Bowser (no relation), who in 2020 was arrested in the Dominican Republic for selling devices which could be used to hack the Switch. Bowser was sentenced to three years in prison, and agreed to pay Nintendo $10m to settle the company’s lawsuit.
Nintendo is seeking “equitable relief and damages” from the makers of Yuzu. If the court agrees that the people behind it helped facilitate the piracy of over a million copies of Tears Of The Kingdom, the sums involved could be equally, eye-wateringly high.
More news on this as we get it.
Read more: 2023 | A brilliant, weird, awful year for videogames
