Last week, Nintendo filed a lawsuit against Switch emulator Yuzu, blaming the emulator for the mass piracy of 2023's "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom" and declaring that "there is no legal way to use Yuzu to play Nintendo Switch games." The developers of Yuzu have hired lawyers and have apparently filed a lawsuit for the first legal showdown over emulation in more than 20 years. Today, however, Yuzu and Nintendo filed a surprise joint motion to settle the lawsuit, with the Yuzu developers agreeing to pay Nintendo "a total of $2.4 million in monetary relief."

As a result of the settlement, Yuzu's development was halted and its distribution stopped.

The lawsuit, which was not entirely certain to turn out in Nintendo's favor, took a dramatic turn. Sony's lawsuits against the Connectix and Bleem. emulators in the early 2000s both resulted in rulings in favor of the emulator developers, but subsequent technological advances have circumvented the Switch's encryption, which is widely prohibited by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, A big question mark remains as to what the court will rule. Nintendo notes that Yuzu is "primarily designed to circumvent technological measures," which is a very specific way of stating that this emulator violates the DMCA.

It is possible that a judge will rule that circumvention is not the primary purpose of the emulator, but merely an act of reverse engineering necessary to play the video game. Such a ruling would be a major victory for the legality of emulation of modern systems. On the other hand, a ruling in Nintendo's favor would threaten many other emulators. On the other hand, a ruling in favor of Nintendo would threaten many other emulators. Losing the case would have been very expensive for the Yuzu developers, and even if they had won the case, the trial and appeal process could have cost them years of legal fees. Apparently, the emulator developers decided that a quick settlement was the safer option.

In their joint motion today, "Defendants and their members acknowledge and agree that the award of monetary relief herein bears a reasonable relationship to the extent of damages and attorneys' fees and all costs that the parties could have expected to be awarded at and after trial in this action." As part of the settlement, the developers of Yuzu waive their right to appeal the judgment and are bound by a permanent injunction that, at least in its present form, effectively means the death of the emulator.

The injunction also requires defendants to cease using the Yuzu-emu.org domain and transfer it to Nintendo's control, and to remove and destroy, to the extent possible, "all circumvention devices, including all copies of Yuzu" and "all circumvention tools used to develop or use Yuzu The law requires. In effect, Yuzu is about to be erased from the Internet, at least officially.

Update: In a post to the Yuzu Discord, lead developer Bunnei announced that "support for yuzu and yuzu's Citra will be discontinued immediately."

The statement continues with a strong energy: "As part of the legal settlement, we must say this:"

"Our project circumvents Nintendo's technical safeguards and allows users to play games on non-genuine hardware. We have found that our project has led to widespread piracy because it allows users to bypass Nintendo's technical protection measures and play games on non-genuine hardware. We are deeply disappointed, especially when users use our software to leak pre-release game content and ruin the experience for legitimate buyers and fans.

"We have come to the conclusion that we cannot continue to allow this to happen. Piracy was never our intention and we believe that piracy in video games and video game consoles should cease. Effective today, we are taking our code repository offline and deactivating our Patreon account and Discord server. We hope that our actions will be a small step towards ending piracy of all creators' works. "

Of course, with software as widely used as Yuzu, it is not easy to completely erase its existence. The source code has been removed from Github, but an archive has already been created and shared among the emulation community. While it is possible that other developers unaffiliated with the project will take over Yuzu's work under a new name, the $2.4 million settlement will likely throw cold water on any future development that might incur Nintendo's wrath.

The question is whether Nintendo's decisive victory here will lead to lawsuits against other emulators, including Yuzu competitor Ryujinx. Since Nintendo and Yuzu settled before the case went to trial, the ruling will have no legal impact on what future court rulings will be made regarding emulation and whether it violates the DMCA. However, the settlement may set in motion a series of lawsuits against other emulators that cannot afford the costs of a protracted legal battle with billion-dollar companies.