The most prominent subreddit dedicated to discussions about Nintendos piracy and emulation was banned Tuesday after more than three years on the platform. The community was first created in May 2020, and as of June 10, Wayback Machine's most recent snapshot, had more than 69,800 members

In recent weeks, the subreddit has grown dramatically, and the attention span, for a controversial subject matter It may have gotten too high: on May 1, when I reported that "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom" had been leaked to piracy sites, it had just over 37,000 members. In the past month and a half, r/NewYuzuPiracy has become the de facto hub of discussion around the modification of "Tears of the Kingdom," at least for players who pirated the game.

As we wrote before the game's official launch, it was a tricky situation for emulation developers. They are usually very careful to distance themselves from any public connection to piracy. In addition to openly discussing pirated games, subreddit contributors sometimes shared "early access" builds of the Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu. They also distributed a mod in development from one of the Switch emulator's most prominent modders, causing him to shut down his own Discord server in frustration.

Given the brazen name, it seems odd that it took so long for Reddit to ban r/NewYuzuPiracy. According to the message that now appears in place of the subreddit, the subreddit was banned "for violating Reddit's content policy, which prohibits the reconfiguration or reuse of subreddits to serve the same purpose as a previously banned or quarantined subreddit.

After that, the subreddit was banned.

Its replacement may soon appear. The subreddit r/YuzuPiracy was banned on April 21, 2020, just two weeks before r/NewYuzuPiracy was created and grew to dominate the search results of Tears of the Kingdom mods. reddit's content moderation priority. Whatever it is, it is clear that actually banning duplicate subreddits is not high on the list.