Yuzu Creators To Pay $2.4 Million Damages To Nintendo And Cease Development Of Switch Emulator

Tropic Haze, the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu, have agreed to an out-of-court settlement of the lawsuit Nintendo filed against them.

To give a brief recap, Nintendo filed a lawsuit against Yuzu a few weeks back, claiming that the emulator was encouraging and facilitating piracy of their games. The example provided was The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, which Nintendo claimed was downloaded least 1 million times before the game’s official launch, with Yuzu being the emulator of choice to circumvent the encryptions that blocked the game from being played before release.

In a surprisingly quick turn of events, Yuzu and Nintendo have mutually agreed to settle the lawsuit. The Yuzu team will pay Nintendo $2.4 million in damages, and will cease development and distribution of the emulators under their management, including the source code. This includes the Switch emulator Yuzu, as well as the 3DS emulator Citra, which is under the same management.

The Yuzu team also shared their own statement about the matter, which echoes many of Nintendo’s concerns. The team admits that because Yuzu can “circumvent Nintendo’s technological protection measures”, it has led to “extensive piracy”. They claim that they have never condoned piracy, and “cannot continue to allow this to occur”. They will thus be abiding by their agreement with Nintendo so shut down the emulator and its website, remove their code repositories, as well as pull the plug on their Patreon and Discord.

As Yuzu and Citra were among the more well-functioning and popular emulators available, this outcome comes as a huge blow to the community. Only time will tell whether there may be further repercussions on other emulator developers moving forward.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.