Yuzu and Citra to shut down following lawsuit

[MiracleDinner]

Following a recent lawsuit between Tropic Haze and Nintendo, it was settled that Tropic Haze are to give Nintendo £2.4M USD and are to cease all operations on Yuzu and Citra, open-source emulators for the Switch and the 3DS respectively.

As of me writing this post, Yuzu's main site is still up, as is Citra's, but the GitHub repositories are already down. (Citra Github, Yuzu Github)

I am absolutely devastated by this sad news, as a daily user of both emulators on my PC, they were both fantastic emulators that allowed me to enjoy more flexible ways to enjoy my Switch and 3DS games, including using any controller I want, easier to record/take screenshots, in all the same place as all my other games, higher resolution and performance, save states, and more. It is also very bad news for long-term game preservation: the 3DS eShop is already down and 3DS systems are seemingly becoming rarer and more expensive, and my 3DS is still working but may not be forever after.

This lawsuit spells very bad news for the future of emulation and console modding in general, which is very sad to me as a great enthusiast of both.

 

[Wendy O. Koopa]

I hate how Nintendo is cracking down on emulation, especially when these game companies including Nintendo don't care about game preservation at all and just want you to keep repaying for the same crap over and over and over again, purposely taking them off the online service so you can't play them anymore until they put them back up and make you pay for them again, etc. It's really really annoying. Sometimes I wonder if older games for the NES and SNES and all that because of this will eventually just be lost to time.

 

[SparksMarioWiki]

I don't use emulation, but this is a MASSIVE PROBLEM for those who use it. Thankfully I have my Nintendo 2DS XL so I can enjoy my 3DS games, but still.

 

[MiracleDinner]

I hate how Nintendo is cracking down on emulation, especially when these game companies including Nintendo don't care about game preservation at all and just want you to keep repaying for the same crap over and over and over again, purposely taking them off the online service so you can't play them anymore until they put them back up and make you pay for them again, etc. It's really really annoying. Sometimes I wonder if older games for the NES and SNES and all that because of this will eventually just be lost to time.

Pretty much, I've always been wary of my favourite games being lost time, as one day my discs/cartridges/consoles will one day fail, and will not be easy to replace. When I was 18 I made it my mission to backup everything so I could preserve everything for myself on my PC through emulation, and I ended up really enjoying how some games run in emulators whilst others I prefer on original hardware. Now, Nintendo has shown they're willing and able to crack down on the emulators themselves, so I don't know anymore. I REALLY hope they don't go for Dolphin as that'd endanger my future ability to play Super Paper Mario, Thousand Year Door, and Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2.

Interestingly, I wonder what about Debian? Debian has Yuzu (and Dolphin) in its apt repositories which I can verify still work when I apt install, I wonder if this lawsuit will force the Debian Project to pull Yuzu from the repo? As far as I'm aware, that'd be a first as Debian stable repos are by design static, meaning packages do not get removed from Debian 12, although they may be excluded from Debian 13 when it releases in 2025.

 

[Wendy O. Koopa]

They already have gone for Dolphin, unfortunately. They took it off of Steam and they are either in the process of or have taken down Dolphin as well. I wish these companies would stop doing this. I wouldn't be as opposed to it if the companies themselves cared about game preservation but it's apparent they do not and that really makes me mad. A lot of these old games are timeless classics and by doing this companies like Nintendo are destroying gaming history and making it so future generations will not be able to enjoy the old games as lately retro gaming and younger generations playing the games their parents and grandparents grew up playing to see what the experience was like for them is on the rise so this creates a problem for THAT, too.

 

[MiracleDinner]

They already have gone for Dolphin, unfortunately. They took it off of Steam and they are either in the process of or have taken down Dolphin as well. I wish these companies would stop doing this. I wouldn't be as opposed to it if the companies themselves cared about game preservation but it's apparent they do not and that really makes me mad. A lot of these old games are timeless classics and by doing this companies like Nintendo are destroying gaming history and making it so future generations will not be able to enjoy the old games as lately retro gaming and younger generations playing the games their parents and grandparents grew up playing to see what the experience was like for them is on the rise so this creates a problem for THAT, too.

Yeah I heard about the situation with Valve/Steam, but afaik there have been no serious attempts by Nintendo to get Dolphin itself shut down altogether and the GitHub repo is still up. But yeah I wouldn't be surprised if that's now just a matter of time.

Totally agree that I'd be a lot less mad if Nintendo themselves offered a feasible alternative to the things they are cracking down on.

I want my grandchildren to play the games I grew up on, because of this lawsuit they might not

 

[Wendy O. Koopa]

I want my grandchildren to play the games I grew up on, because of this lawsuit they might not

It's tragic, really. And it's not just Nintendo that is doing all this. All the game companies are.

 

[SparksMarioWiki]

@Grape brings up a great point. I want my children and grandchildren to enjoy the awesomeness that is Mario! I'd love to show them Super Mario Galaxy for example. But I just can't take my Wii U everywhere I go! With the Nintendo Switch it's easy to take anywhere and set up but it's not like that with the Wii U. Not all fantastic Mario games can be found on the Nintendo Switch.

 

[MiracleDinner]

@Grape brings up a great point. I want my children and grandchildren to enjoy the awesomeness that is Mario! I'd love to show them Super Mario Galaxy for example. But I just can't take my Wii U everywhere I go! With the Nintendo Switch it's easy to take anywhere and set up but it's not like that with the Wii U. Not all fantastic Mario games can be found on the Nintendo Switch.

Galaxy 2 might be a stronger example as that game was never re-released on the Switch at all, although 3D All-Stars was expensive and a limited release. And yeah being able to play these games on the go is definitely a great plus to emulation as well - I myself often play SPM in the cafeteria which wouldn't be possible without Dolphin.

 

[MiracleDinner]

Update: Both Yuzu's and Citra's main sites (yuzu-emu.org and citra-emu.org) are now down, and are replaced with the following message:

Spoiler: Message from Yuzu team

Hello yuz-ers and Citra fans:
We write today to inform you that yuzu and yuzu's support of Citra are being discontinued, effective immediately.

yuzu and its team have always been against piracy. We started the projects in good faith, out of passion for Nintendo and its consoles and games, and were not intending to cause harm. But we see now that because our projects can circumvent Nintendo's technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy. In particular, we have been deeply disappointed when users have used our software to leak game content prior to its release and ruin the experience for legitimate purchasers and fans.

We have come to the decision that we cannot continue to allow this to occur. Piracy was never our intention, and we believe that piracy of video games and on video game consoles should end. Effective today, we will be pulling our code repositories offline, discontinuing our Patreon accounts and Discord servers, and, soon, shutting down our websites. We hope our actions will be a small step toward ending piracy of all creators' works.

Thank you for your years of support and for understanding our decision.

 

[Daniel Dyce]

Their biggest mistake was deciding to exist
A critical mistake if you ask me.

 

[Wendy O. Koopa]

@Daniel Dyce When you say that are you referring to Yuzu and Citra existing, or Nintendo?

BTW just on a side note I like Nintendo as a company and the awesome games and franchises they have created but I do NOT like the way they conduct their business sometimes.

 

[Daniel Dyce]

The one that paid 2.4 million dollars in exchange for Nintendo not suing their balls into oblivion
It was a strategic error to get into a situation where a giant mega corp was ready to destroy you 10 times over in legal fees alone.

 

[Toka Hebizuka]

The Yuzu team were charging money to let users get access to early builds, which they were actively updating to support The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom like a week before it released, of course Nintendo would be mad, that's essentially piracy.
Reminder this is the same team that wanted to start their own online service for their emulator, which 100% would be competing with Nintendo. They've been asking to get in trouble for a fair bit now.

Ryujinx still exists so it's not as if you can't emulate Switch games anymore.

Also this means nothing for emulation, they settled out of court, no prescedent has been set, the legality of emulation hasn't changed. The only things this says is that charging money for things Nintendo owns is a bad idea, which has been made fairly clear in the past.

 

[Wendy O. Koopa]

The Yuzu team were charging money to let users get access to early builds, which they were actively updating to support The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom like a week before it released, of course Nintendo would be mad, that's essentially piracy.
Also this means nothing for emulation, they settled out of court, no prescedent has been set, the legality of emulation hasn't changed. The only things this says is that charging money for things Nintendo owns is a bad idea, which has been made fairly clear in the past.

Oh yeah that's actually true. I didn't even know they were doing that. No wonder Nintendo got mad. And it looks like Nintendo was in the right in this case because of that.

 

[Toka Hebizuka]

I also see a couple mentions of Dolphin on Steam, Nintendo never removed Dolphin from Steam. Valve contacted Nintendo about it, and Nintendo was obviously against it, but they didn't force them to remove it or anything. The removal was Valve's choice.

EDIT: The Dolphin team wrote a whole article about what happened if you're interested in knowing what happened.

 

[Thomas the Tank Engine]

I hate how Nintendo is cracking down on emulation, especially when these game companies including Nintendo don't care about game preservation at all and just want you to keep repaying for the same crap over and over and over again, purposely taking them off the online service so you can't play them anymore until they put them back up and make you pay for them again, etc. It's really really annoying. Sometimes I wonder if older games for the NES and SNES and all that because of this will eventually just be lost to time.

I genuinely do not understand why people keep peddling the nonsense claim that Nintendo doesn't care about game preservation at all.

They are arguably the best company when it comes to preservation of their games.

Do y'all not remember the Nintendo Gigaleak? Where hackers who accessed Nintendo's servers and got access to data Nintendo had archived going back to the late 1980s? Including things like source codes, prototypes, cancelled games, cut content, etc.

That whole leak wouldn't have happened if Nintendo didn't give a shit about preservation like y'all are so convinced is true.

Hell Nintendo keeps archives of the code of games developed for their platforms by third-parties. One big example: Collection of Mana, the compilation release of Final Fantasy Adventure, Secret of Mana, and Trial of Mana, Square-Enix literally had to get the code for these three games from Nintendo themselves because SE didn't have it anymore.

You can buy Sky Skipper on the Nintendo Switch as part of the Arcade Archives series. That's an arcade game Nintendo developed in 1981 that never left location testing and never got a wide release because of poor reception in test markets in both Japan and the US and, in response to the negative reception, Nintendo decided to convert the Sky Skipper cabinets to Popeye ones. Except one North American cabinet survived that fate and remained archived at Nintendo of America's HQ.

Actually to even further drive the point home about how much Nintendo does care about preservation (in contrast to what people claim): the founder of Factor 5 made a deal with Nintendo where if they were able to ship the game Star Wars Rogue Squadron II on schedule, then they could borrow the Sky Skipper cabinet for use in Factor 5's own employee arcade.

The game was shipped on time and Factor 5 received the cabinet from Nintendo but they discovered one of the ROM chips was dead, so they contacted Genyo Takeda (one of the designers of the game, alongside Shigeru Miyamoto) who provided Factor 5's founder the original files from Nintendo's archives so he could repair the machine.

To reiterate: Nintendo still possesses the original files for an arcade game that completely flopped in test markets, was never widely released, and only has one cabinet that still exists.

And yet people still insist Nintendo doesn't care about preservation?

Also there is literally no chance that games from older systems are going to be lost to time. I think the only things that would cause older games to be lost forever would be something so catastrophic that 'Oh no we don't have NES games anymore' would be the least of our worries lol.

 

[Wendy O. Koopa]

@Princess Viola Oh. I didn't know all of that. I feel dumb LOL. Maybe we all are just complaining about nothing with game preservation and Nintendo-a problem which doesn't exist. But yeah I think it's because a lot of people don't know about Nintendo's game preservation efforts that they think they don't care about it.

 

[Revin]

They already have gone for Dolphin, unfortunately. They took it off of Steam and they are either in the process of or have taken down Dolphin as well.

to elaborate on what sgow said, this is not what happened. tl;dr before it's steam release, valve themselves asked nintendo's legal if they were okay with dolphin being released on steam, nintendo predictably said "no", and valve then told the dolphin devs that they would have to hash it out with nintendo if they wanted the release to go through, and dolphin naturally decided to abandon the steam release plan and keep going with their separate releases. dolphin made a blog post going into detail on the circumstances of the situation a little bit after it blew over, where they specifically said that nintendo did not issue a DMCA takedown or other legal action against them. in the past 7 or so months since this happened, they have continued to operate as normal, updating the software, writing progress reports, etc.
you can read the full details here: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2023/07/20/what-happened-to-dolphin-on-steam/

as for this situation, like sgow said, this seems more fueled by the fact that yuzu was, among other things, getting 30k a month from patreon, a sum which apparently went up big time during the two weeks before the release of TOTK, because it actively allowed people to play it from an illegal leak. in this specific case, it's fairly clear that the "it's all just about preservation!!! meanie nintendo is stopping important preservation work" excuse doesn't really apply in this situation (and, as viola has pointed out so well above, is honestly a pretty weak excuse in general tbh. you downloading a bunch of roms that were already available online is not "preserving" anything, and any actual preservation on a historical level that will actually endure is being done by actual organisations, not the guy who downloaded TOTK to play on his Steam Deck a week early lol). as we've seen with dolphin, even if nintendo is aware of an emulator doesn't always mean they can do what they've done here, and the only reason that citra is getting taken down is because it's by the same team, who have agreed to not do ANY emulator development ever again, meaning it got caught in the crossfire. so unless the other switch emulator ALSO gets taken out in the next few months, then i doubt this will mean a lot for emulation as a whole, and i don't think people speculating on it will accomplish anything other than stirring themselves into a frenzy for no good reason

 

[Thomas the Tank Engine]

I think a big issue is that people often conflate archival and preservation with public accessibility, but they're two separate things.

Of course you can definitely argue that archival/preservation without public access is pointless, but the problem is that for what people want when they mean 'public access' (in the case of this subject: widespread availability of older video games from Nintendo and other companies), you're either going to have to hope the companies who hold the copyright to these games decide to (re)release them (and seeing as they're companies, which is unlikely unless they can make enough profit off of them) or a widespread reform of copyright law (also unlikely to happen because such things are actively fought against).

A good non-gaming example would be the National Film Registry, which is the US National Film Preservation Board's collection of films that have been selected for preservation. There are a grand total of 875 films that have been inducted in the NFR since 1989, but (outside of films they have preserved that have fallen into the public domain), they can't provide widespread public access to these films because they don't have the rights to these films. Just because 2001: A Space Odyssey is being preserved by the NFR doesn't mean they can go and make it available for free download.

And unfortunately, as long as we live in a profit-motivated society, the public access that people want at the scale they desire will never happen as long as these rights are controlled by the owners of the IP.

 

[LeftyGreenMario]

People are focused on the fact that yuzu profited off the work, but Nintendo's main argument in the lawsuit is that the emulator required dumped keys to run, a sort of bring-your-BIOS to run, which is basically what emulators use to run, including Ryujinx and Dolphin, Cemu? The settlement indicates that this isn't established as a precedent yet, but Nintendo may as well try to take down Ryujinx and Dolphin using these arguments because they also need keys to run. I think it's still valid to worry about the future prospects, even if there's some comfort that every other emulator have existed for years including Nintendo apparently being okay with Dolphin. I hope Ryujinx doesn't have anything dumb behind the scenes like that lavish Patreon. Perhaps yuzu's own hubris is the issue here and it'll hurt the emulation scene as whole. I'm not happy at either Nintendo OR yuzu.

 

[Thomas the Tank Engine]

Ryujinx's devs are based in Brazil, so it'd be a lot harder for Nintendo to go after them. (They also try to err in the side of legality and they don't have a Patreon either, I think they accept donations but that's it).

 

[LeftyGreenMario]

Ryujinx | Patreon

creating a Nintendo Switch emulator

www.patreon.com

They do have a Patreon but afaik the perks are basically related to testing the thing and not trying to get people to play games before release, but update me on that. I'm still worried about that aspect though. It reminds me of a SM64 modder Kaze?? He got into Nintendo's crosshairs from SM64 mods but turns out he ran a Patreon for those things.

I hope Ryujinx takes measures to protect themselves. I think emulation is vital for game accessibility (or also making use of your gaming rig's performance; it's super cool running your favorite switch games at better settings) and I don't think emulation is going away as long as people have appetite for old games they can't easily acquire. I do buy games when I need to, I've bought practically most games until I switched to mostly relying on my desktop for gaming. Nintendo has consoles to sell, though, probably understandably, so they're not gonna offer their games for desktop emulation. I would've otherwise bought legacy Nintendo (or games exclusive to Nintendo consoles; I want to play Crystal Chronicles with my sister again and the remake sucks a lot afaik) games on steam or GOG, that would've been cool. Owning stuff you buy is cool. Buying Spore off GOG was certainly easier than the alternative.

 

[Thomas the Tank Engine]

Ah, I only read that they accepted donations and didn't realize that their donations (as linked on their website) was a Patreon lol.

 

[MiracleDinner]

The Yuzu team were charging money to let users get access to early builds, which they were actively updating to support The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom like a week before it released, of course Nintendo would be mad, that's essentially piracy.

Crikey, I'd no idea the Yuzu team were doing such a thing, that certainly adds a justifiable basis for Nintendo trying to have them shut down.

Link to the Exhibit A here - this document doesn't seem to mention that Yuzu were deliberately profiting from piracy of leaked Nintendo games, but rather rests much of its logic on the fact that Yuzu uses the dumped keys to decrypt games outside of the Switch, which apparently makes Yuzu "software primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing technological measures" and therefore a violation of DMCA.

The Preliminary Statement is here - I've just found this and it does seem that the piracy situation with TotK was indeed a significant factor particularly behind the hefty fine, but it does also talk about how Yuzu requires the "unlawfully extracted" keys as well as "unlawfully" hacking the Switch to obtain "at least one unauthorized copy of a Nintendo Switch game"

Nintendo's main argument in the lawsuit is that the emulator required dumped keys to run, a sort of bring-your-BIOS to run, which is basically what emulators use to run, including Ryujinx and Dolphin, Cemu?

I've read Dolphin's statement about the Valve/Steam situation and It seems like Wii games are encrypted, but all Wii's have the same key - the Wii Common Key - which Dolphin integrates into their codebase. GC games are not encrypted. Dolphin claims that they are legally in the clear because Dolphin isn't primarily for circumventing Technological Measures, even if a part of it may do so. I'm quite worried that this defense appears to be contradicted by the recent judgement.

As for Citra, I recall that the modded 3DS itself is used to decrypt the games, and Citra runs using the decrypted game images.

Cemu runs decrypted dumps, which you get with Dumpling. I've only ever used Dumpling so idk about any other methods.

and the only reason that citra is getting taken down is because it's by the same team, who have agreed to not do ANY emulator development ever again, meaning it got caught in the crossfire.

If this is the only reason Citra had to get taken down, I wonder if Citra at least could continue to exist if a different team forked it and took over development and distribution (as Citra is FOSS)?

I genuinely do not understand why people keep peddling the nonsense claim that Nintendo doesn't care about game preservation at all.

They are arguably the best company when it comes to preservation of their games.

Do y'all not remember the Nintendo Gigaleak? Where hackers who accessed Nintendo's servers and got access to data Nintendo had archived going back to the late 1980s? Including things like source codes, prototypes, cancelled games, cut content, etc.

That whole leak wouldn't have happened if Nintendo didn't give a shit about preservation like y'all are so convinced is true.

Hell Nintendo keeps archives of the code of games developed for their platforms by third-parties. One big example: Collection of Mana, the compilation release of Final Fantasy Adventure, Secret of Mana, and Trial of Mana, Square-Enix literally had to get the code for these three games from Nintendo themselves because SE didn't have it anymore.

You can buy Sky Skipper on the Nintendo Switch as part of the Arcade Archives series. That's an arcade game Nintendo developed in 1981 that never left location testing and never got a wide release because of poor reception in test markets in both Japan and the US and, in response to the negative reception, Nintendo decided to convert the Sky Skipper cabinets to Popeye ones. Except one North American cabinet survived that fate and remained archived at Nintendo of America's HQ.

Actually to even further drive the point home about how much Nintendo does care about preservation (in contrast to what people claim): the founder of Factor 5 made a deal with Nintendo where if they were able to ship the game Star Wars Rogue Squadron II on schedule, then they could borrow the Sky Skipper cabinet for use in Factor 5's own employee arcade.

The game was shipped on time and Factor 5 received the cabinet from Nintendo but they discovered one of the ROM chips was dead, so they contacted Genyo Takeda (one of the designers of the game, alongside Shigeru Miyamoto) who provided Factor 5's founder the original files from Nintendo's archives so he could repair the machine.

To reiterate: Nintendo still possesses the original files for an arcade game that completely flopped in test markets, was never widely released, and only has one cabinet that still exists.

And yet people still insist Nintendo doesn't care about preservation?

Also there is literally no chance that games from older systems are going to be lost to time. I think the only things that would cause older games to be lost forever would be something so catastrophic that 'Oh no we don't have NES games anymore' would be the least of our worries lol.

I'm sure Nintendo has all their games in a vault somewhere (heck, a recent example proving this to me is the Mario vs Donkey Kong remake, as it seems Nintendo kept the uncompressed files of Martinet's voice clips all these years), but my point was more that if and when my 3DS breaks (thankfully hasn't happened yet) and I can't easily find a new one, I want to be able to keep playing Dream Team using a personal backup of my copy that I legally purchased and paid for. I don't want to wait who knows how long until they re-release DT (assuming they ever do), I don't want to always have to own the latest console to play it, I don't want to pay full price (or worse yet a continual subscription) to continue playing a game I already bought just because my old hardware stopped working. Citra was the solution to this.

NSO is another step in the wrong direction here, as you can play old games on the Switch, but only as long as you continually pay for the subscription - there is no way to buy them permanently like you could on the Wii U. And there isn't even a discount for those who already bought the same games on the Wii or Wii U, which Nintendo at least did for Wii U VC.