Nintendo sues dev team of Switch emulator Yuzu

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Isaac Todd
February 28, 2024
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Nintendo has filed a new lawsuit in the US against Tropic Haze, the development team behind popular Switch emulator Yuzu.

As spotted by Stephen Totilo, Nintendo is seeking to stop further development of Yuzu and removing its main download source (naturally, there’ll always be many re-uploads elsewhere).

It’s also seeking compensation for perceived damages, mainly around the emulator’s use for piracy. According to Nintendo, over one million copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom were downloaded from piracy sites before the game was legally available. It also attempts to link this to the Yuzu dev team by noting that some of said piracy sites specifically mentioned Yuzu as the way to play using these copies.

Taking action against emulation isn’t exactly new for Nintendo. They’ve gone after sites hosting backups of games in the past, and blocked the release of GameCube/Wii emulator Dolphin on Steam. It remains to be seen whether the lawsuit will be successful, though the Yuzu Patreon is still currently up and running — it makes a sizeable £23,750 each month (excluding Patreon’s cut).

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