Yuzu Closed Down

Nintendo Switch And 3DS Emulators Yuzu And Citra Have Closed Down After Nintendo Threatened Legal Action

A week after Nintendo threatened legal action, Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu as well as 3D emulator Citrus are both closing down and will be unable to distribute its source code with the creator Tropical Haze also ordered to pay $2.4 million dollars to Nintendo.

In addition to being unable to distribute Yuzu code or features or hosting websites and social media that promotes Yuzu, the company will also need to hand over the domain to Nintendo as well.

Popular emulation frontend EmuDeck has already announced that both emulators have been removed from the platform.

You can read the below statement by creator Bunnei:

“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.”

This will obviously have huge ramifications for the emulation scene, and it’ll be interesting to see what happens in the near future to other emulators.