this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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Yuzu emulator shutting down, paying Nintendo 2.4 million in lawsuit settlement (gbatemp.net)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 144 points 8 months ago (5 children)

Yuzu fucked up. This is about more than the decryption. Yuzu's actions (copypasta from a fine redditor):

  • Massive patreon, to the point it has an LLC set to manage the money flow
  • Early access releases are effectively SOLD, they fucked around with manifest/build files, abused GPL to go after some forks back when they were Citra, attacked other forks/emulators then benefitted from their work and even replicated their practices (like CEMU's patreon), etc
  • Actively targets Switch competitors (Steam Deck, Android), to the point Valve once included it in a marketing reel
  • Its presence on the OFFICIAL Android play store rather than an apk competes with Nintendo's own Android games (undermining both those and the Switch)
  • Unauthorized use of Nintendo imagery
  • Extensive telemetry, itself juicy data that could be sold for advertisers, on top of Nintendo's own built-in telemetry that's also sent
  • Patreon marketing is heavily focused on games that broke street day release date, and even when they show some "restraint" it's just a release day post how much better the game runs on a platform that's not the Nintendo Switch, in the same launch period where most sales happen
  • Progress reports timed suspiciously close to major Nintendo first-party releases
  • ATTEMPTED to make a competitor to the Switch Online service, using files from an external preservation group, and it would have been a PAID service, and the subscription MORE EXPENSIVE than Nintendo's actual service (it was $60 something) despite smaller compatibility, for games still online, as a CLOSED-SOURCE FORK of a GPL PROJECT so that players don't actually set up their own custom servers to avoid paying Yuzu's pittance. When there was backlash, they REMOVED all traces of online emulation after they couldn't profit off it.
[–] [email protected] 41 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Yeah their problem was to make it a commercial operation. At that point it's trivial for Nintendo to show they've enriched themselves on the back of ripped ROMs by enabling them.

Whereas if you do everything for free and don't even accept donations, they'd have a big problem showing that you have any commercial interest and hence can be sued for damages.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Reverse engineering software (and even using small bits of proprietary code when required) in order to make it compatible with other hardware is fully legal (tons of precedent, for emulation specifically see Sega v Accolade and Sony v Connectix), and selling emulators commercially is also fully legal (Sega v Connectix was about a commercial Playstation emulator for the Mac, Sony v Bleem was about a commercial emulator for the PC and Dreamcast)

Nintendo's legal claims against Yuzu are completely untested and dubious at best, it's the threat of spending millions of dollars on lawyers that's very real and effective, they are yet again simply weaponizing the courts and the DMCA like all the other corpo scum before them

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (3 children)

The problem is that this shit is a lot of work that we all benefit from... So how do we compensate the devs?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That's the neat part, you don't.

Same as any other type of internet piracy. I don't give money to some guy ripping his movies or games.

The only way to do things like this is anonymously for the shits and giggles. A Patreon to make it their job is one thing, but the fact that they can pay $2.4million shows it went beyond that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Yeah fuck that. That's unsustainable and will only result in the end of piracy. We should feel bad for being leechers forever, imo. And we should strive to assist the causes we believe in, however we can.

On a similar note, I struggle to reconcile my contempt of Russian/Chinese policies with my adoration and support for piracy and the brave souls that maintain all the big projects we enjoy/rely on.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

We don't, that's kinda the point. If you want to compensate the developers, you should buy their games.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

How about the work of the devs that made the game...?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago

It's really just that they profited from it.

If it was more than just that, they would have, or will in the near future, go after Ryujinx or the many incoming forks of Yuzu.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

Early access releases are effectively SOLD, they fucked around with manifest/build files, abused GPL to go after some forks back when they were Citra, attacked other forks/emulators then benefitted from their work and even replicated their practices (like CEMU’s patreon), etc

Source on this?

Also saying that EA was being sold is false, they were shipping precompiled binaries with the EA branches for the patrons, they were actually using the people that paid them for testing lol.

If you used linux there was even an Aur package that built yuzu ea for you, which I quickly stopped using because EA was just the equivalent of the testing repo of archlinux, if you ever read their updates on their main discord, half the time the next EA release just removed a PR that broke something after release.

Progress reports timed suspiciously close to major Nintendo first-party releases

They only made progress reports once a month lol, and iirc the progress report for totk was several weeks after release even.

Its presence on the OFFICIAL Android play store rather than an apk competes with Nintendo’s own Android games (undermining both those and the Switch)

Nothing wrong here, even dolphin has a official apk on the playstore, and yuzu actually even released a non playstore apk for people like me with an ungoogled phone lol.

Extensive telemetry, itself juicy data that could be sold for advertisers, on top of Nintendo’s own built-in telemetry that’s also sent

Bullshit, their logs only contain info about the hardware, which is something you need to debug lol, Ryu logs are the same.

ATTEMPTED to make a competitor to the Switch Online service, using files from an external preservation group, and it would have been a PAID service, and the subscription MORE EXPENSIVE than Nintendo’s actual service (it was $60 something) despite smaller compatibility, for games still online, as a CLOSED-SOURCE FORK of a GPL PROJECT so that players don’t actually set up their own custom servers to avoid paying Yuzu’s pittance. When there was backlash, they REMOVED all traces of online emulation after they couldn’t profit off it.

I also want a source on this.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

Very few of those are legally problematic, pretty much just the imagery, possibly GPL issues (but Nintendo wouldn't have standing for those), and due to copyright weirdness 3rd party online services for games which still have active online services (it shouldn't be, but that's how it's been interpreted)

Not enough for Nintendo to be able to force the project to stop, but they didn't want to fight it in court I assume

[–] mindbleach 3 points 8 months ago

Don't care.

Fuck Nintendo for this.

Emulation is legal, DRM is an abuse against your rights, and making a program easy to use is not some kind of eeevil scheme.