Tropico Haze has revealed that development of the Yuzu and Citra emulators was halted as part of Nintendo’s recent lawsuit settlement.
This information was published by Tropico Haze through its social media. If you are interested in the state of the video game industry, you can check out our other articles here.
Yuzu and Citra Emulators Discontinued, Why?
A week ago, Nintendo officially sued the creator of the Yuzu emulator, Tropico Haze. According to the publicly viewable filing, Tropic Haze not only agreed to pay USD $2.4 million to Nintendo, but also revealed that Yuzu was “designed to avoid and play Nintendo Switch games”.
Tropic Haze also agreed to permanently stop working on Yuzu, hosting Yuzu, distributing Yuzu code or features, hosting its websites and social media, or doing anything else that circumvents Nintendo’s copyright protection.
In addition, Tropic Haze will hand over the domain name yuzu-emu.org to Nintendo and agree to remove copies of Yuzu and “all circumvention tools used to develop or use Yuzu, such as TegraRcmGUI, Hekate, Atmosphère, Lockpick_RCM, NDDumpTool, nxDumpFuse, and TegraExplorer”.
Tropic Haze also agreed not to remove any other “evidence” that infringes Nintendo’s intellectual property rights. On the other hand, Tropico Haze must hand over “physical circumvention devices” and “modified Nintendo hardware” to Nintendo.
On its social media, Tropico Haze added that the decision affects the Yuzu and Citra emulators as a whole. Here’s their official statement:
Hello Yuz-ers and Citra fans,
We are writing today to let you know that Yuzu and Citra support will be discontinued soon.
Yuzu and his team have always been against piracy. We started this project in good faith, out of interest in Nintendo and their consoles and games, and did not intend to cause any harm. But now we see that because our project was able to circumvent Nintendo’s technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, it has led to massive piracy. In particular, we are very disappointed when users use our software to leak game content before release and ruin the experience of legitimate buyers and fans.
We have made the decision that we cannot continue to allow this to happen. Piracy has never been our intention and we believe that piracy of video games and video game consoles must end. Starting today, we will be taking our code repository offline, shutting down our Patreon account and Discord server, and, soon, closing our website. We hope our actions will be a small step towards ending piracy of the work of all creators.
Thank you for your support over the years and understanding our decision.
Tropico Haze
It should be noted that the entire proposed final judgment and permanent injunction has not yet been approved by the judge. However, the source code for Yuzu and Citra has been pulled from GitHub.
For now, Nintendo and Tropic Haze are asking the judge to rule that Yuzu avoided the DMCA by using a Nintendo key, even though the key was not included. They specifically asked for this:
Developing or distributing software, including Yuzu, that essentially only works when cryptographic keys are integrated without authorization, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (DMCA) prohibition on trafficking in devices that circumvent effective technological measures because the software is primarily designed to circumvent technological measures.
Nintendo & Tropico Haze
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