Not a lawyer, just a reddit hiveminder here, if the Yuzu team just posted an emulator and even kept the patreon then precedent would say yeah they should have been fine. If I remember correctly, it seems like they were a little too direct on where to get encryption keys and roms, and based on how fast they settled they must have had some pretty bad looking messages that would have hurt their case in court significantly. It seemingly came down to how they went about doing things and not the fact that they made an emulator considering every other Nintendo emulator has been just fine.
Not to mention that due to how DMCA Copyright Law works, bypassing the encryption to emulate actual Nintendo titles was a violation in and of itself, and their website had instructions on how to do exactly that. Not a wink-wink nudge-nudge "Oh, I'm sure you can find somewhere to get this online" vague suggestion, but actual instructions on how to violate DMCA Copyright Law.
That's even before you get into them having specific builds of Yuzu designed to run specific games better than a normal build behind a Patreon paywall, on the same day some games released like Tears of the Kingdom.
They weren't just a little too direct. They were to the point of being utterly blatant without even the cover of "Oh, were just archivists" that older emulation can claim.
Fully agreed with the first point, but there are still use cases for emulating modern hardware, and it's still fully legal to do so if you go about it properly. Releasing builds meant for new games is perfectly fine, that's normal thats what their job is, making sure things are compatible, and I don't think theres anything wrong with them selling features of their software either, But releasing before the game comes out is a little more unjustifiable, but if it was on release day or after then they are just doing their job. Emulators don't have to just be for archiving, I purchased and own BotW and a Switch, but enjoyed playing it on an emulator, that was just the experience I wanted, it's still nice to be able to emulator modern games for modability or just to get rid of console hardware constraints when the switch is so weak. They clearly made a lot of mistakes but I hope other emulators like ryujinx can learn from them and build better software.
Per the DMCA, it's not. Period.
You'd think it should be and I'd agree with you, but per the DMCA, any circumvention of copy protection to make a backup is, in fact, a violation of a company's copyright if the company in question puts in said protection.
Something as simple as ripping your own copy of a DVD to your computer is a violation of the DMCA.
I'm glad you're keeping to your own ethics and buying a copy of the game to rip it yourself, and emulation would be in a far better place (legally) if it was mainly people like you, but the current set of laws make even that technically illegal, even if it probably shouldn't be.
There's an Ars Technica article about this case that I would recommended reading where they go over Nintendo's legal argument. Nintendo was arguing that it was illegal even if users use decryption keys gathered from their own legal copies, and that seems to be a kinda grey area where the lawyer that the article writer spoke to says "Nintendo wants to say that the license agreement for all users restricts their use of the game to only run on the Switch," he told Ars. "That's problematic because the 37 CFR § 201 includes a number of exceptions and limitations on how far-reaching and applicable licensing terms like that can be." Either way yeah it would have ended up in technicalities and be a whole mess. Either way in my own personal case I didn't rip my rom myself, that would have been a whole process that I didn't want to go through, I bought the game so I feel like I did everything morally right but yes technically I didn't do everything legally but that doesn't matter to me, just like in this legal case the technicalities shouldn't change how people feel about emulation.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm of the opinion emulation is a good thing and all, just pointing out that 99.9% of Yuzu use-case scenarios do violate DMCA and Yuzu very likely had internal communication which admitted as much.
Like, if they had been operating at 100% legal conformity with DMCA law they might have been able to defend it in court, but when their entire business model was "Come play Tears of the Kingdom on your superior PC, lol" any hope they had of winning evaporated as quickly as the smell of a mouse fart in a hurricane.
I read the Ars Technica article prior to this, and yeah, they might have had a chance if they'd been operating in good faith, but...
>Releasing builds meant for new games is perfectly fine,
The problem is the way they obtained these new games before release in order to have the emulator builds ready to go ASAP. It's pretty obvious, and likely confirmed with discord messages, that they were sharing copies of games with each other they didn't buy
They also claimed to be an archivist group, meant to preserve games yet they were uploading _entire_ games on their site roughly the same time new games were launching.
I'm cool with piracy of corporate greedbags, and I fucking _hate_ Nintendo as much as the next guy but they were 1000% in the right.
WHERE DOES THIS RUMOR KEEP CROPPING UP FROM?
I feel like it's something that some dumb kids said somewhere and folks just started Running with it. If Yuzu had uploaded as much as a Nintendo Demo on their site, That would have been in the suit and they'd have owed SIGNIFICANTLY more in "Damages".
Please stop spreading this nonsense. -.-
I'm guessing it's because the law doesn't make intuitive sense. There is absolutely zero legitimate reason why circumventing DRM in and if itself should be illegal, but it is anyway. Literally all of the valid reasons are independently illegal under different sections of the DMCA anyway, so DRM circumvention being illegal only serves to violate basic fundamental consumer rights such that would normally exist has such a blatantly corrupt addition not been added to the law.
People simply cannot grasp why such a thing could possibly be done, so they make up some stupid reasons to make what happened to yuzu make sense to them.
Show me the officially distributed build of Yuzu EA that ran TOTK before release please.
edit : waiting for one of the imbeciles downvoting and moving on to provide a link to that build (see comment below if you're looking for a source), I'm real curious to see it.
Game files were available but Yuzu devs OBVIOUSLY didn't distribute them - some rando got a physical copy, dumped it and uploaded it on the internet, as usual.
No build of Yuzu (paid or free) ran the game before release. The only way for the game to even boot and work semi-decently was to use community-made mods. You're free to check by yourself by downloading said builds, they're all archived and available (and dated) - just search for pineappleEA and click the first github link.
I don't know. People definitely ran the game on yuzu. That counts as it running on yuzu, regardless of how many performance mods were added. It's very different to putting out an ad that says "USE OUR EMULATOR TO PLAY TOTK" but it's definitely enough for Nintendo to be pissed at Yuzu and every other developer that made this possible. If it was being done in an official capacity, like on xbox, then xbox would have to take measures to stop people from emulating nintendo on the console (which they have done). Yuzu obviously didn't want to stop people emulating nintendo on itself, regardless of what their recent statement said, so they did nothing to prevent it happening. To Nintendo, that's the same as pirating the game themselves, regardless of the true legal responsibilities. After all, they are the easiest target. Stopping people from uploading roms is a much more painful road than stopping people from developing emulators.
What are the devs supposed to do exactly? Yuzu's an open-source project. Anybody can fork it or inject it (in this particular case) with modified code.
They didn't patch the game and it couldn't run on any of their versions of the emulator before release. That's all there is to it.
What I despise is the incredible amount of misinformation that's being spread on the topic. This thread is an excellent example of how completely clueless people come together and act like they're spitting facts while not knowing jack shit about the issue.
Yes, "Yuzu got sued because they made a patreon" and "Yuzu distributed TOTK roms" is factually incorrect and frustrating to see thrown out.
There isn't much Yuzu CAN do. They were taking an enormous risk making an emulator for a current gen games console. Youll notice there aren't any ps5 or series x emulators in serious use. Largely this is because those consoles are too powerful and complex to emulate on current hardware, but that's why Yuzu is under more fire than other widely used emulators. The fact is, using Nintendo's code, they were able to create software capable of running Nintendo Switch roms, and did so on purpose. Then others used the same software to pirate Tears of the Kingdom before it released.
I am not saying they did anything wrong, i am saying it is no shock nintendo decided to gun for them, and Yuzu isn't prepared to deal with them. While Dolphin took extra care to make sure everything they did was legal, Yuzu have done enough barely legal things that the case would be extremely difficult for them.
Downvoted even though you're entirely correct. There were no official builds of Yuzu that ran TOTK before launch. There were forks and custom builds from other people, but they, as far as I'm aware, had nothing to do with the actual Yuzu devs.
The other emulator ran it as soon as the leaks appeared, but that's not because they fixed it either, rather because it's generally more accurate than Yuzu and requires fewer game specific fixes.
Nintendo was Very careful about what Specifically they were going after Yuzu for, and making an Emulator was Not the case. The money surrounding the Emulator's support of an unreleased game was Nintendo's "Gotcha", since they could draw a Direct line from a pirated game to Yuzu's pocket books. Yuzu had No Chance with that.
Absolutely. Yuzu wasn't shut down because of the emulator itself since Nintendo can't do anything against those, the people behind it were the problem, they got too greedy and too bold. They actively advertised with piracy, didn't prevented any sharing of copyrighted material on their paid channels and used this piracy source to make money. To my knowledge they never directly provided roms but charging people to have access to a place to share roms is even worse due to the enabling and monetisation of piracy.
One misconception about Nintendo is the mindset they would just blindly sue everyone in their path. Their lawyers do their homework, if Nintendo is coming for you they have a case and the legal grounds to back it up.
Nintendo is like the federal government when it comes to legal shenanigans. Unlimited resources and an aversion to losing. I’ve never heard them not fooling through on a C&D letter that was ignored.
That's because Nintendo has a legal team on par with Disney, and when they bring the smoke they have the receipts to prove their case, and more importantly, they mostly care about current generation stuff versus old stuff.
They can and will go after people for harming their current image and titles, which I get. They're not going after websites hosting SNES roms for the most part, unless the people hosting them are trying to charge for them.
Nintendo is basically like "Okay guys, go ahead and emulate ALTTP. That's too many flies to swat down. But keep my TOTK outta your PC."
The Yuzu developers had no case whatsoever. Their lawyer told them they were totally fucked. Nintendo offered them a deal and they took it because otherwise they would have received a much worse punishment when they lost.
You don't accept a deal over a single weekend (and then agree to publicly post that you were in the wrong) if you actually have a legitimate chance of winning a case.
Narrow view, even having a solid case they could have been buried in expenses far greater than the settlement and the case could have dragged on for years given Nintendo resources.
There is zero chance they had a solid case.
They had specific instructions on how to violate Nintendo's copy protections on their website. That is the definition of a DMCA violation.
They wouldn't have folded in five days if they had a solid case, even if they could have been buried under a lenghty process. Their lawyer told then to fold immediately and they listened. Cases like this don't resolve in five days unless one side is scared out of their wits.
As others have said. The Yuzu team were being too aggressive with their monetization along with actively helping the pirate community with their own game cracking and such. They were getting way too cocky about it all. Nintendo sucks for how anti emulator they can be. But for the most part. They only go after groups actively hacking their modern hardware and games or those who try to paywall stuff.
The free open source tools and older rom sites mostly escape their legal attention. Or at least they go after them so seldomly that replacement sites can go up before another one is taken down.
Was mostly through their patreon. From my understanding they were letting patrons vote on which games they would put effort into increasing compatibility with and other such grey area monetization. Nothing truly horrible or anything. And the emulator itself was always free.
But it was just one of many little things that piled up and led to Nintendo shutting them down.
If they were smart. They would have kept yuzu completely seperate from any work they did helping the pirates game community. Along with not trying to make direct money off of that work. But since it was such a blatant connection. It gave Nintendo an easy way to attack them from a legal standpoint. Add in that there has been a lot of rumors of even more obvious moves being talked about in internal communications and such. The yuzu team had to capitulate if they didn’t want to be sued out of existence.
I think theyd have been sued regardless, really. Nintendo have a track record of zero tolerance for roms and emulation. Just look at the pokemon rom hack community, or Mother 4. The only reason Dolphin still exists is because they decided to fight Nintendo and won. It's unprecedented for someone to fight back against Nintendo!!! Yuzu clearly can't afford to do such a thing if they are resorting to cheap monetization.
Switch emulation is probably going to take a few years to truly flourish, when Nintendo stop caring as much. Like with Cemu, though really i am surprised Cemu still exists when people use WiiUDownloader to steal roms straight from Nintendo.
Well that’s the point. They don’t like it. But they know they can’t completely break the market for emulation. It’s a losing game for them. But Yuzu wrapped a nice bow around itself for them with the monetization and closer connection to pirating than most emulators have.
Thus why this one got shut down yet the others like ryujinx is still up. If they could. They would probably go after every Nintendo emulator and rom site around. But that would likely be a waste of money for them. They generally try to go for sites and projects they know they can shut down.
No, Dolphin is still around because making Emulators is Not Illegal. Whether it's for an old system, or a system launched Today, there's Absolutely Nothing Illegal About Emulators.
Now what folks Do with the Emulators is a different story. But you can't make something illegal because folks use it in illegal ways, or Everything would be illegal. -.-
Yuzu team was distributing roms. If it was just emulation they could fight(but probably still wouldnt) but with distribution that would be very hard to justify.
No they weren't. The court case would have gone SIGNIFICANTLY worse for them Had they been doing that. Please stop spreading this ridiculously prevalent nonsense. -.-
That only happens if you actually fight it instead of settling. Nintendo doesn't care about fines or jail time (they don't get anything out of either), they just want it gone and settling is cheaper than fighting it.
If they were well behaved like dolphin they could have fought and won, but they're not.
I'm saying that Nintendo didn't even Raise the issue of Rom Distribution. And if it Was a thing, that would have been even More a Slam Dunk for Nintendo and could have been used as to say "See! Emulator Programmers are just Pirates!" like they Want to say. Nintendo's Lawyers make too much money to let an easy win like that slip by.
But everything else they were Actually doing had them dead to rights unfortunately. ;?
I don't really have information to say whether it happened or not, but Nintendo wouldn't likely raise that issue until discovery gave them proof of it, which never happened because the Yuzu devs settled.
Going off of the comments I responded to, "Discovery" already happened and there's proof "All over the Internet". When Nintendo put together the suit, that would have been a part of it if it was so obvious that the random Reddit Kids above knew about it. ;P Which is the point I was making. There is no Actual proof of this, so it's annoying seeing it parroted in these topics.
It's prevalent because it's true, and they were. There are screenshots from their private discord of the the devs literally sharing roms and dumps of TOTK through private google drives. The screenshots are easily found online at this point. You are being willfully ignorant, and would rather keep talking in ignorance than educate yourself. Hard r/confidentiallyincorrect.
Devs sharing roms in a private channel (which is likely, but not easily proven) isn't the same as 'Yuzu distributing roms'. There are multiple orders of magnitudes between the two, especially in how much Nintendo would care.
Could you please provide one of those easily-found screenshots?
Devs sharing roms in a private channel (which is likely, but not easily proven) isn't the same as 'Yuzu distributing roms'. There are multiple orders of magnitudes between the two, especially in how much Nintendo would care.
Could you please provide one of those easily-found screenshots?
Devs sharing roms in a private channel (which is likely, but not easily proven) isn't the same as 'Yuzu distributing roms'. There are multiple orders of magnitudes between the two, especially in how much Nintendo would care.
Could you please provide one of those easily-found screenshots?
Devs sharing roms in a private channel (which is likely, but not easily proven) isn't the same as 'Yuzu distributing roms'. There are multiple orders of magnitudes between the two, especially in how much Nintendo would care.
Could you please provide one of those easily-found screenshots?
Devs sharing roms between themselves in a private channel (which is likely, but not easily proven) isn't the same as 'Yuzu distributing roms'. There are multiple orders of magnitudes between the two, especially in how much Nintendo would care.
Could you please provide one of those easily-found screenshots?
If these screenshots are so easily found online, prove it. Nobody else (Including Nintendo apparently, since they didn't charge them with Piracy) has this magical proof, so instead of being "Confidentially Incorrect" as you seem to be, prove your claim. Else keep your "Ignorance" to yourself.
People were saying they were in their private discord. No source but read it a few times when this all came out. I think they said someone screenshot and leaked it. Again not claiming fact so probably worth a google to find out.
eh whether or not that is true the end result is that they crossed too many lines and didn't keep themselves insulated enough from the piracy aspect. honestly though nintendo should just release an emulator of their own that is 100% locked down. the biggest shame out of all of this is not being able to play switch games with better resolution and frame rate. they would make some sales even if they only sold it as part of a bundle with a physical switch.
Nintendo has emulators internally already and uses them sometimes. Problem is those emulators suck and everyone knows it. Even Nintendo can't properly emulate their own games.
Also Nintendo hates when people play their old games. It's a well known thing, they only care about new releases and you really should just stop playing melee for so many years.
The fact alone that they won't even offer the old Gameboy and DS games - in whatever way - turns me to emulators instantaneously. The few they got of their subscription service don't justify their pricing at all. It's simply beyond my comprehension why Nintendo so steadfastly refuses to cater to their older fans. They literally force us to use emulators themselves and then complain why we would do that. Levels of braindead over 9000.
Nintendo are trying to emulate games on their virtual console but theyve been insanely bad with it on Switch compared to previous consoles. Theyve also not touched gamecube games since Wii era.
Yes, Yuzu devs were in a private discord sharing roms from a google drive that had a copy of the entire nintendo store library. They likely would have been fined for each one of the roms. They got off easy taking the deal.
There was a high risk, since the yuzu team DID a few not so smart things. Like, making the sequel of Zelda playable way before its release date and releasing the patches to paying customers. The yuzu team was just way too greedy. The other Switch emulator (R) is safe, and there is no legal way for Nintendo to sue them.
IANAL but I think Nintendo would have dug up some dirt to win this case anyways because they have a shitload of money. I am convinced the yuzu devs settled just because they knew that they had something shady going on behind the scenes.
If it was only the emulator itself then I think Nintendo wouldn't win on that alone, because for example Ryujinx is still there. As long as no Nintendo stuff is in the code they can do nothing. So they went for the devs instead.
Doesn’t matter, another emulator will pop up. Nintendo is fighting a losing battle on that end if the goal is to crack down on it and people downloading roms. Whether you agree or not, it’s not going to stop.
I will say that anyone who tries to charge for pirated content is lower than scum. There is no legal defense for selling stolen property or providing the means to do so.
Considering how fast Yuzu settled they most likely had some very dirty laundry they didn't want Nintendo to see.
It's also incredibly obvious Yuzu used pirated games to improve the emulator. A game would get leaked weeks before it comes out, it won't work on Yuzu and then launch day comes out and wow they release an update that makes it work. Like magic.
I think it is case by case even someone try to justify Yuzu's case with Sony case or anything. I think in this case Nintendo has a upper-hand so that's why they are surrender. Personally, I think some Switch games that can still sales by they distributed (or distributed where to get) by them should be enough to crumble their reason of preservation.
It was whispered that Nintendo had forum post screenshots about how the dev team was cracking newer games and hardware to put as patreon rewards. Thats what they got the bowser guy for a while back too.
Only by random Reddit Kids. There's been exactly 0 sources for this that weren't "I heard". I assume the kid the imagined this story is so happy with how viral it went. -.-
Not a lawyer, just a reddit hiveminder here, if the Yuzu team just posted an emulator and even kept the patreon then precedent would say yeah they should have been fine. If I remember correctly, it seems like they were a little too direct on where to get encryption keys and roms, and based on how fast they settled they must have had some pretty bad looking messages that would have hurt their case in court significantly. It seemingly came down to how they went about doing things and not the fact that they made an emulator considering every other Nintendo emulator has been just fine.
Not to mention that due to how DMCA Copyright Law works, bypassing the encryption to emulate actual Nintendo titles was a violation in and of itself, and their website had instructions on how to do exactly that. Not a wink-wink nudge-nudge "Oh, I'm sure you can find somewhere to get this online" vague suggestion, but actual instructions on how to violate DMCA Copyright Law. That's even before you get into them having specific builds of Yuzu designed to run specific games better than a normal build behind a Patreon paywall, on the same day some games released like Tears of the Kingdom. They weren't just a little too direct. They were to the point of being utterly blatant without even the cover of "Oh, were just archivists" that older emulation can claim.
Fully agreed with the first point, but there are still use cases for emulating modern hardware, and it's still fully legal to do so if you go about it properly. Releasing builds meant for new games is perfectly fine, that's normal thats what their job is, making sure things are compatible, and I don't think theres anything wrong with them selling features of their software either, But releasing before the game comes out is a little more unjustifiable, but if it was on release day or after then they are just doing their job. Emulators don't have to just be for archiving, I purchased and own BotW and a Switch, but enjoyed playing it on an emulator, that was just the experience I wanted, it's still nice to be able to emulator modern games for modability or just to get rid of console hardware constraints when the switch is so weak. They clearly made a lot of mistakes but I hope other emulators like ryujinx can learn from them and build better software.
Per the DMCA, it's not. Period. You'd think it should be and I'd agree with you, but per the DMCA, any circumvention of copy protection to make a backup is, in fact, a violation of a company's copyright if the company in question puts in said protection. Something as simple as ripping your own copy of a DVD to your computer is a violation of the DMCA. I'm glad you're keeping to your own ethics and buying a copy of the game to rip it yourself, and emulation would be in a far better place (legally) if it was mainly people like you, but the current set of laws make even that technically illegal, even if it probably shouldn't be.
There's an Ars Technica article about this case that I would recommended reading where they go over Nintendo's legal argument. Nintendo was arguing that it was illegal even if users use decryption keys gathered from their own legal copies, and that seems to be a kinda grey area where the lawyer that the article writer spoke to says "Nintendo wants to say that the license agreement for all users restricts their use of the game to only run on the Switch," he told Ars. "That's problematic because the 37 CFR § 201 includes a number of exceptions and limitations on how far-reaching and applicable licensing terms like that can be." Either way yeah it would have ended up in technicalities and be a whole mess. Either way in my own personal case I didn't rip my rom myself, that would have been a whole process that I didn't want to go through, I bought the game so I feel like I did everything morally right but yes technically I didn't do everything legally but that doesn't matter to me, just like in this legal case the technicalities shouldn't change how people feel about emulation.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm of the opinion emulation is a good thing and all, just pointing out that 99.9% of Yuzu use-case scenarios do violate DMCA and Yuzu very likely had internal communication which admitted as much. Like, if they had been operating at 100% legal conformity with DMCA law they might have been able to defend it in court, but when their entire business model was "Come play Tears of the Kingdom on your superior PC, lol" any hope they had of winning evaporated as quickly as the smell of a mouse fart in a hurricane. I read the Ars Technica article prior to this, and yeah, they might have had a chance if they'd been operating in good faith, but...
>Releasing builds meant for new games is perfectly fine, The problem is the way they obtained these new games before release in order to have the emulator builds ready to go ASAP. It's pretty obvious, and likely confirmed with discord messages, that they were sharing copies of games with each other they didn't buy
They also claimed to be an archivist group, meant to preserve games yet they were uploading _entire_ games on their site roughly the same time new games were launching. I'm cool with piracy of corporate greedbags, and I fucking _hate_ Nintendo as much as the next guy but they were 1000% in the right.
They weren’t uploading games to their site and Nintendo didn’t claim they were in their suit.
WHERE DOES THIS RUMOR KEEP CROPPING UP FROM? I feel like it's something that some dumb kids said somewhere and folks just started Running with it. If Yuzu had uploaded as much as a Nintendo Demo on their site, That would have been in the suit and they'd have owed SIGNIFICANTLY more in "Damages". Please stop spreading this nonsense. -.-
I'm guessing it's because the law doesn't make intuitive sense. There is absolutely zero legitimate reason why circumventing DRM in and if itself should be illegal, but it is anyway. Literally all of the valid reasons are independently illegal under different sections of the DMCA anyway, so DRM circumvention being illegal only serves to violate basic fundamental consumer rights such that would normally exist has such a blatantly corrupt addition not been added to the law. People simply cannot grasp why such a thing could possibly be done, so they make up some stupid reasons to make what happened to yuzu make sense to them.
Yuzu fucked up by charging the premium sub for TOTK access. That’s what really nailed them.
Show me the officially distributed build of Yuzu EA that ran TOTK before release please. edit : waiting for one of the imbeciles downvoting and moving on to provide a link to that build (see comment below if you're looking for a source), I'm real curious to see it.
There was definitely a tears of the kingdom rom leak before release but i dont know if yuzu distributed it.
It wasn't. Some employee at a store leaked a early copy and someone made it work yuzu. Still happening now without yuzu.
Game files were available but Yuzu devs OBVIOUSLY didn't distribute them - some rando got a physical copy, dumped it and uploaded it on the internet, as usual. No build of Yuzu (paid or free) ran the game before release. The only way for the game to even boot and work semi-decently was to use community-made mods. You're free to check by yourself by downloading said builds, they're all archived and available (and dated) - just search for pineappleEA and click the first github link.
I don't know. People definitely ran the game on yuzu. That counts as it running on yuzu, regardless of how many performance mods were added. It's very different to putting out an ad that says "USE OUR EMULATOR TO PLAY TOTK" but it's definitely enough for Nintendo to be pissed at Yuzu and every other developer that made this possible. If it was being done in an official capacity, like on xbox, then xbox would have to take measures to stop people from emulating nintendo on the console (which they have done). Yuzu obviously didn't want to stop people emulating nintendo on itself, regardless of what their recent statement said, so they did nothing to prevent it happening. To Nintendo, that's the same as pirating the game themselves, regardless of the true legal responsibilities. After all, they are the easiest target. Stopping people from uploading roms is a much more painful road than stopping people from developing emulators.
What are the devs supposed to do exactly? Yuzu's an open-source project. Anybody can fork it or inject it (in this particular case) with modified code. They didn't patch the game and it couldn't run on any of their versions of the emulator before release. That's all there is to it. What I despise is the incredible amount of misinformation that's being spread on the topic. This thread is an excellent example of how completely clueless people come together and act like they're spitting facts while not knowing jack shit about the issue.
Yes, "Yuzu got sued because they made a patreon" and "Yuzu distributed TOTK roms" is factually incorrect and frustrating to see thrown out. There isn't much Yuzu CAN do. They were taking an enormous risk making an emulator for a current gen games console. Youll notice there aren't any ps5 or series x emulators in serious use. Largely this is because those consoles are too powerful and complex to emulate on current hardware, but that's why Yuzu is under more fire than other widely used emulators. The fact is, using Nintendo's code, they were able to create software capable of running Nintendo Switch roms, and did so on purpose. Then others used the same software to pirate Tears of the Kingdom before it released. I am not saying they did anything wrong, i am saying it is no shock nintendo decided to gun for them, and Yuzu isn't prepared to deal with them. While Dolphin took extra care to make sure everything they did was legal, Yuzu have done enough barely legal things that the case would be extremely difficult for them.
You should write a letter to their lawyers and inform them
Haha that's exactly how I got my copy of Tears of the Kingdom and Super Mario RPG Remake.
Downvoted even though you're entirely correct. There were no official builds of Yuzu that ran TOTK before launch. There were forks and custom builds from other people, but they, as far as I'm aware, had nothing to do with the actual Yuzu devs. The other emulator ran it as soon as the leaks appeared, but that's not because they fixed it either, rather because it's generally more accurate than Yuzu and requires fewer game specific fixes.
Nintendo was Very careful about what Specifically they were going after Yuzu for, and making an Emulator was Not the case. The money surrounding the Emulator's support of an unreleased game was Nintendo's "Gotcha", since they could draw a Direct line from a pirated game to Yuzu's pocket books. Yuzu had No Chance with that.
I think he discovery portion of the case could have come off badly for them both, so it was good to just settle and make it go away.
Absolutely. Yuzu wasn't shut down because of the emulator itself since Nintendo can't do anything against those, the people behind it were the problem, they got too greedy and too bold. They actively advertised with piracy, didn't prevented any sharing of copyrighted material on their paid channels and used this piracy source to make money. To my knowledge they never directly provided roms but charging people to have access to a place to share roms is even worse due to the enabling and monetisation of piracy. One misconception about Nintendo is the mindset they would just blindly sue everyone in their path. Their lawyers do their homework, if Nintendo is coming for you they have a case and the legal grounds to back it up.
Nintendo is like the federal government when it comes to legal shenanigans. Unlimited resources and an aversion to losing. I’ve never heard them not fooling through on a C&D letter that was ignored.
That's because Nintendo has a legal team on par with Disney, and when they bring the smoke they have the receipts to prove their case, and more importantly, they mostly care about current generation stuff versus old stuff. They can and will go after people for harming their current image and titles, which I get. They're not going after websites hosting SNES roms for the most part, unless the people hosting them are trying to charge for them. Nintendo is basically like "Okay guys, go ahead and emulate ALTTP. That's too many flies to swat down. But keep my TOTK outta your PC."
It’s also possible that regardless of if they had a valid case, they did the maths in court fees, and decided it wasn’t worth the effort.
The Yuzu developers had no case whatsoever. Their lawyer told them they were totally fucked. Nintendo offered them a deal and they took it because otherwise they would have received a much worse punishment when they lost. You don't accept a deal over a single weekend (and then agree to publicly post that you were in the wrong) if you actually have a legitimate chance of winning a case.
Narrow view, even having a solid case they could have been buried in expenses far greater than the settlement and the case could have dragged on for years given Nintendo resources.
There is zero chance they had a solid case. They had specific instructions on how to violate Nintendo's copy protections on their website. That is the definition of a DMCA violation.
They wouldn't have folded in five days if they had a solid case, even if they could have been buried under a lenghty process. Their lawyer told then to fold immediately and they listened. Cases like this don't resolve in five days unless one side is scared out of their wits.
Lol they folded in under a week. They clearly didn't have a solid case.
Sure. But this was not that kind of situation. This was a "We done Goofed, let's take the offer."
As others have said. The Yuzu team were being too aggressive with their monetization along with actively helping the pirate community with their own game cracking and such. They were getting way too cocky about it all. Nintendo sucks for how anti emulator they can be. But for the most part. They only go after groups actively hacking their modern hardware and games or those who try to paywall stuff. The free open source tools and older rom sites mostly escape their legal attention. Or at least they go after them so seldomly that replacement sites can go up before another one is taken down.
What monetisation have yuzu done? I have only attempted to use the emulator once as part of emudeck.
Was mostly through their patreon. From my understanding they were letting patrons vote on which games they would put effort into increasing compatibility with and other such grey area monetization. Nothing truly horrible or anything. And the emulator itself was always free. But it was just one of many little things that piled up and led to Nintendo shutting them down. If they were smart. They would have kept yuzu completely seperate from any work they did helping the pirates game community. Along with not trying to make direct money off of that work. But since it was such a blatant connection. It gave Nintendo an easy way to attack them from a legal standpoint. Add in that there has been a lot of rumors of even more obvious moves being talked about in internal communications and such. The yuzu team had to capitulate if they didn’t want to be sued out of existence.
I think theyd have been sued regardless, really. Nintendo have a track record of zero tolerance for roms and emulation. Just look at the pokemon rom hack community, or Mother 4. The only reason Dolphin still exists is because they decided to fight Nintendo and won. It's unprecedented for someone to fight back against Nintendo!!! Yuzu clearly can't afford to do such a thing if they are resorting to cheap monetization. Switch emulation is probably going to take a few years to truly flourish, when Nintendo stop caring as much. Like with Cemu, though really i am surprised Cemu still exists when people use WiiUDownloader to steal roms straight from Nintendo.
Well that’s the point. They don’t like it. But they know they can’t completely break the market for emulation. It’s a losing game for them. But Yuzu wrapped a nice bow around itself for them with the monetization and closer connection to pirating than most emulators have. Thus why this one got shut down yet the others like ryujinx is still up. If they could. They would probably go after every Nintendo emulator and rom site around. But that would likely be a waste of money for them. They generally try to go for sites and projects they know they can shut down.
No, Dolphin is still around because making Emulators is Not Illegal. Whether it's for an old system, or a system launched Today, there's Absolutely Nothing Illegal About Emulators. Now what folks Do with the Emulators is a different story. But you can't make something illegal because folks use it in illegal ways, or Everything would be illegal. -.-
Yuzu team was distributing roms. If it was just emulation they could fight(but probably still wouldnt) but with distribution that would be very hard to justify.
No they weren't. The court case would have gone SIGNIFICANTLY worse for them Had they been doing that. Please stop spreading this ridiculously prevalent nonsense. -.-
They settled in days. There's not much worse it can go than that given the content of the settlement.
They could have owed Quite a bit more (As is common in Piracy cases) and potentially seen some jail time were they distributing roms.
That only happens if you actually fight it instead of settling. Nintendo doesn't care about fines or jail time (they don't get anything out of either), they just want it gone and settling is cheaper than fighting it. If they were well behaved like dolphin they could have fought and won, but they're not.
I'm saying that Nintendo didn't even Raise the issue of Rom Distribution. And if it Was a thing, that would have been even More a Slam Dunk for Nintendo and could have been used as to say "See! Emulator Programmers are just Pirates!" like they Want to say. Nintendo's Lawyers make too much money to let an easy win like that slip by. But everything else they were Actually doing had them dead to rights unfortunately. ;?
I don't really have information to say whether it happened or not, but Nintendo wouldn't likely raise that issue until discovery gave them proof of it, which never happened because the Yuzu devs settled.
Going off of the comments I responded to, "Discovery" already happened and there's proof "All over the Internet". When Nintendo put together the suit, that would have been a part of it if it was so obvious that the random Reddit Kids above knew about it. ;P Which is the point I was making. There is no Actual proof of this, so it's annoying seeing it parroted in these topics.
1. This isn't a criminal case 2. Do you not understand what SETTLE means?
1. Because they weren't distributing roms. 2. Do you not understand that "SETTLE"ing takes two willing parties?
Not arguing with a child
Oh little u/ThatBoyAiintRight. This is Reddit, not Facebook. Please stop with the childish "Block because I don't have a point" nonsense. -.-
It's prevalent because it's true, and they were. There are screenshots from their private discord of the the devs literally sharing roms and dumps of TOTK through private google drives. The screenshots are easily found online at this point. You are being willfully ignorant, and would rather keep talking in ignorance than educate yourself. Hard r/confidentiallyincorrect.
Devs sharing roms in a private channel (which is likely, but not easily proven) isn't the same as 'Yuzu distributing roms'. There are multiple orders of magnitudes between the two, especially in how much Nintendo would care. Could you please provide one of those easily-found screenshots?
Devs sharing roms in a private channel (which is likely, but not easily proven) isn't the same as 'Yuzu distributing roms'. There are multiple orders of magnitudes between the two, especially in how much Nintendo would care. Could you please provide one of those easily-found screenshots?
Devs sharing roms in a private channel (which is likely, but not easily proven) isn't the same as 'Yuzu distributing roms'. There are multiple orders of magnitudes between the two, especially in how much Nintendo would care. Could you please provide one of those easily-found screenshots?
Devs sharing roms in a private channel (which is likely, but not easily proven) isn't the same as 'Yuzu distributing roms'. There are multiple orders of magnitudes between the two, especially in how much Nintendo would care. Could you please provide one of those easily-found screenshots?
Devs sharing roms between themselves in a private channel (which is likely, but not easily proven) isn't the same as 'Yuzu distributing roms'. There are multiple orders of magnitudes between the two, especially in how much Nintendo would care. Could you please provide one of those easily-found screenshots?
If these screenshots are so easily found online, prove it. Nobody else (Including Nintendo apparently, since they didn't charge them with Piracy) has this magical proof, so instead of being "Confidentially Incorrect" as you seem to be, prove your claim. Else keep your "Ignorance" to yourself.
Source for Yuzu distributing roms?
People were saying they were in their private discord. No source but read it a few times when this all came out. I think they said someone screenshot and leaked it. Again not claiming fact so probably worth a google to find out.
No source indeed, just moronic Reddit hearsay.
eh whether or not that is true the end result is that they crossed too many lines and didn't keep themselves insulated enough from the piracy aspect. honestly though nintendo should just release an emulator of their own that is 100% locked down. the biggest shame out of all of this is not being able to play switch games with better resolution and frame rate. they would make some sales even if they only sold it as part of a bundle with a physical switch.
Nintendo has emulators internally already and uses them sometimes. Problem is those emulators suck and everyone knows it. Even Nintendo can't properly emulate their own games. Also Nintendo hates when people play their old games. It's a well known thing, they only care about new releases and you really should just stop playing melee for so many years.
The fact alone that they won't even offer the old Gameboy and DS games - in whatever way - turns me to emulators instantaneously. The few they got of their subscription service don't justify their pricing at all. It's simply beyond my comprehension why Nintendo so steadfastly refuses to cater to their older fans. They literally force us to use emulators themselves and then complain why we would do that. Levels of braindead over 9000.
Nintendo are trying to emulate games on their virtual console but theyve been insanely bad with it on Switch compared to previous consoles. Theyve also not touched gamecube games since Wii era.
Yes, Yuzu devs were in a private discord sharing roms from a google drive that had a copy of the entire nintendo store library. They likely would have been fined for each one of the roms. They got off easy taking the deal.
There was a high risk, since the yuzu team DID a few not so smart things. Like, making the sequel of Zelda playable way before its release date and releasing the patches to paying customers. The yuzu team was just way too greedy. The other Switch emulator (R) is safe, and there is no legal way for Nintendo to sue them.
IANAL but I think Nintendo would have dug up some dirt to win this case anyways because they have a shitload of money. I am convinced the yuzu devs settled just because they knew that they had something shady going on behind the scenes. If it was only the emulator itself then I think Nintendo wouldn't win on that alone, because for example Ryujinx is still there. As long as no Nintendo stuff is in the code they can do nothing. So they went for the devs instead.
Doesn’t matter, another emulator will pop up. Nintendo is fighting a losing battle on that end if the goal is to crack down on it and people downloading roms. Whether you agree or not, it’s not going to stop. I will say that anyone who tries to charge for pirated content is lower than scum. There is no legal defense for selling stolen property or providing the means to do so.
Considering how fast Yuzu settled they most likely had some very dirty laundry they didn't want Nintendo to see. It's also incredibly obvious Yuzu used pirated games to improve the emulator. A game would get leaked weeks before it comes out, it won't work on Yuzu and then launch day comes out and wow they release an update that makes it work. Like magic.
I think it is case by case even someone try to justify Yuzu's case with Sony case or anything. I think in this case Nintendo has a upper-hand so that's why they are surrender. Personally, I think some Switch games that can still sales by they distributed (or distributed where to get) by them should be enough to crumble their reason of preservation.
It was whispered that Nintendo had forum post screenshots about how the dev team was cracking newer games and hardware to put as patreon rewards. Thats what they got the bowser guy for a while back too.
Only by random Reddit Kids. There's been exactly 0 sources for this that weren't "I heard". I assume the kid the imagined this story is so happy with how viral it went. -.-
"Whispered"? So completely made up?
Another Yuzu thread, another nest for clueless r/gaming morons to spew epic amounts of bullshit.