As you’ve no doubt noticed over the past couple of weeks, Nintendo has been laying the smackdown on emulators and ROM uploaders in every corner of the internet. Their public takedown of Yuzu and the following $2.4 million lawsuit that they filed with regards to piracy surrounding Tears of the Kingdom has scared a lot of emulator developers into taking their programs down for fear of suffering the same fate.
The main problem with having an open-source emulator on the internet that allows people to have access to code is that, as we’ve seen with the likes of PPSSPP influencing many other emulator programs, that code gets spread around incredibly quickly. But in a wide-scale takedown more impressive than the RICO case that Rachel Dawes and Harvey Dent used to charge Falconi’s men in The Dark Knight, Nintendo has removed 8,535 copies of Yuzu from GitHub in one day using one DMCA takedown notice.
A DMCA notice comes from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and they filed the notice with GitHub to target areas where Yuzu code was being stored in an attempt to wipe out the Switch emulator once and for all. Reading in TorrentFreak, I discovered that this all happened ‘in the time it took to send an email’. GitHub contacted all owners of the repositories where Yuzu code could be found to give them a chance to make changes before the wipeout happened, highlighting files that should be removed.
Has Nintendo succeeded in pulling out of all the Yuzu weeds in their back garden? I think while they have made a good start, it’s going to take a while before every trace of the emulator has gone. They certainly didn’t mess around with the poorly titled emulator Suyu, and I think it won’t be long until the likes of Ryujinx meet the same fate as Yuzu.
The disappearance of Yuzu also brought the destruction of Citra too, one of the go-to 3DS emulators that many community members used as either an emulator or core. We’ve recently covered the news that Folium, a new 3DS emulator, is planning on heading to the App Store after the new changes in Apple’s policies, and while the developer says that he isn’t worried about Nitnendo’s wrath, I wonder how Nintendo will view the fact that it will be available to purchase for $4.99. While Nintendo emulators of past consoles are thriving on the App Store, the future of Switch emulation, for now, looks like it’s drawing to a swift close.
