Two of the most high profile emulator projects were wiped out in an afternoon. In the days since, more have followed. The developer of Pizza Boy, a paid Game Boy emulator for Android, pulled it from the shop, writing “I have chosen to prioritize my family over the development of my apps.” A 3DS homebrew developer pulled their tools from Github. Android DS emulator DraStic went free, will soon go open source, and the developer says they plan to pull it from the Google Play store at some point.
Legally, the Yuzu settlement sets no precedent. But you can sure as hell feel the chill cast over the whole scene.
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If you buy a Switch, you should be able to dump its encryption keys, and you should be able to study it and write software to reproduce its functions if you have the skill it takes to do so. If you buy a game, you should be able to back it up. If you buy a Kindle book or an iTunes MP3, you should be able to strip that DRM and put it on the device of your choice. So it should be, but the law unfortunately doesn’t offer us these clear protections.
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. . . but seeing my own reporting mentioned in the lawsuit reinforced for me how much lawyers will bend any innocuous thing their way to make it sound like proof of guilt. They cited that “in an interview Bunnei game to PC Gamer” ⬆️ he stated Yuzu’s developers were aware people were modding Tears of the Kingdom to get it running in the emulator pre-release. I mean… duh? Of course they were aware! How could they not be aware? What are they guilty of, not doing the ‘see no evil’ pose for two weeks 🙈? The lawyers also claim “thousands of additional paid members of Yuzu’s Patreon signed up so that they could download the early access build and play unlawful copies of Zelda: TotK,” making it sound an awful lot like Yuzu’s developers were updating the emulator to play Tears of the Kingdom pre-release.But they weren’t. That didn’t happen.
Perhaps all the devs had pirated the game in secret and were getting updates ready for day one, I don’t know — but I do know they weren’t releasing builds to support it until the release day, no matter what the slippery legal phrasing implies.
I think the reason yuzu got targeted so hard is because modern smartphones were becoming powerful enough to emulate switch games. If anyone with a higher end Android phone made in the past few years (which many people already have) can just slap a controller on it and get the same handheld experience as those with an actual switch, Nintendo’s business model would take a significant hit. And the switch successor is also planning on using the same architecture, so there’s an element of future proofing here.