One week. One week is all it took for Nintendo and Yuzu’s parent company, Tropic Haze, to “come to an agreement.” Unfortunately, that agreement doesn’t bode well for the future of Switch emulation.
Filed earlier today, the “Final Judgment” was rendered in the case between Nintendo and Tropic Haze. As we write this, terms of the agreement are still coming out, but, things are looking pretty grim.
First of all, Tropic Haze is being ordered to pay $2.4 million in damages. This comes in response to Nintendo’s claims that Yuzu circumvented its software encryption. All of this rested on the shoulders of Tears of the Kingdom, which was leaked ahead of its official launch, and Nintendo claims it was downloaded “over one million times.”
It’s All Over for Yuzu
A more important portion of the settlement agreement effectively renders Yuzu dead. You can read the entire judgment here, but here’s the important part:
A permanent injunction is entered against Defendant enjoining it and its members, agents, servants, employees, independent contractors, successors, assigns, and all those acting in privity or under its control from:
Offering to the public, providing, marketing, advertising, promoting, selling, testing, hosting, cloning, distributing, or otherwise trafficking in Yuzu or any source code or features of Yuzu;
But the fun doesn’t stop there. This also comes from the same court filing:
The Court further orders, pursuant to 17 U.S.C. §§ 503 & 1203, upon Nintendo’s election and to the extent controlled by Defendant or its members, the destruction by deletion of all circumvention devices, including all copies of Yuzu, all circumvention tools used for developing or using Yuzu—such as TegraRcmGUI, Hekate, Atmosphère, Lockpick_RCM, NDDumpTool, nxDumpFuse, and TegraExplorer, and all copies of Nintendo cryptographic keys including the prod.keys, and all other electronic material within Defendant or its members’ custody, possession, or control that violate Nintendo’s rights under the DMCA or infringe copyrights owned or exclusively licensed by Nintendo.
As I’ve been trying to read through this and understand it all, it seems that the wheels have already been put in motion. If you try navigating to the Yuzu Github Repository, you’re now met with a “404” message. So it seems that Nintendo is wasting no time in shutting down everything it can with regard to Yuzu.
Yuzu Github 404
Some are suggesting this could be due to certain features being made available behind a paywall. Yuzu offered both an “early access” Patreon, along with a paid version of the Android app on the Play Store. This might have been the dagger that gave Nintendo the leverage to move forward.
Yuzu’s Response
It came as a little bit of a surprise, but an official announcement was made on the Yuzu Discord server. It confirms that “Yuzu and Yuzu’s support of Citra are being discontinued, effective immediately.” Here’s the full statement:
Yuzu Official Statement on Discord
We’ll be sure to provide more updates as they become available. Needless to say, it’s a sad day. Not only for the future of Switch emulation but for the emulation community on the whole.
The End of Citra, Too
As it turns out, Yuzu wasn’t the only emulator to take a major hit, as questions swirled in regards to what would happen to Citra. The reason for this is that the main version of Citra comes from the same development team as Yuzu, both operating under the Tropic Haze LLC.
With news quickly spreading about what is happening to Yuzu, the end has also arrived for Citra. This means that arguably the best Nintendo 3DS emulator has met an unfortunate demise. Although the Play Store listing for the free version appears to still be live, you’ll find no such luck in the GitHub repository. Instead, it’s been wiped from the web.
What This Means
Ryujinx Interface March 2024 Update
It isn’t taking long for the community to react to this news. The first domino to fall was JELOS, with the developer confirming that the next version would be removing support for Switch emulation. EmuDeck was next in line stating that with the latest release of 2.1.5, neither Yuzu nor Citra are available.
Instead, we’ll all need to start getting cozy with Ryujinx for Switch emulation on x86 devices. Unfortunately, things aren’t going to be quite as easy when it comes to Android handhelds. In the meantime, it’ll be interesting to see if this has bigger ramifications for the emulation community.
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