The developer of the Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu entered into a sudden settlement with Nintendo on Monday, agreeing to pay the gaming company $2.4 million in damages and stop developing and distributing the emulator. As a result of that settlement, Citra, the 3DS emulator that shared developers with Yuzu, also went offline.

Citra's Twitter account posted a message originally shared on the Yuzu Discord to "Yuzu-ers and Citra fans," stating that "Yuzu and Yuzu's support for Citra will be discontinued immediately."

The Github repository where Citra code is stored has been closed. In the settlement between Yuzu and Nintendo, the emulator developer agreed to "surrender, directly or indirectly, to Plaintiff's control and permanently cease use of any other website or system owned or controlled by Defendants or their members that involves Nintendo's intellectual property."

Nintendo's lawsuit strictly targets Tropic Haze, LLC, a company supposedly created by Yuzu's developers to make it easier to handle Patreon's revenue; since the two emulators have the same founder, Citra is part of the above settlement collateral damage.

Citra actually existed years before Yuzu (and the Nintendo Switch itself); Citra was first created in 2014 and over time became the de facto emulator for playing the 3DS handheld on PC and Android phones. The Switch was a newer, more exciting console, and Yuzu Patreon proved to be lucrative, eventually earning tens of thousands of dollars per month around the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in 2023.

The 3DS emulator, by its current name, is probably dead, but it may not be the end of the road. Like most open source software, Citra had many contributors, some of whom seem to be unrelated to the Yuzu developers. No doubt an archive or fork of the emulator's code already exists.

Also, Citra is not the only 3DS emulator in the world; there are other emulators that can effectively run many 3DS games, such as Mikage and Panda3DS.