Nintendo, a company once best known for its iconic game characters but now known for being the gaming company with the most lawyers on speed dial, has decided to end February off by doing what they do best – suing someone.
This time, they’ve turned their gaze of justice upon the Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu, an emulator that’s been around since 2018 and allowed gamers the chance to play Switch exclusives without owning a Switch – something that was never going to end well.
According to the lawsuit filed by Nintendo, the Yuzu unlawfully circumvents the technological measures that prevent Switch games from being playable on other hardware and is a piece of software that allows users to unlawfully play pirated videogames that were published only for a specific console on a general-purpose computing device.
Infringing copies of the game that circulated online were able to be played in Yuzu, and those copies were successfully downloaded from pirate websites over one million times before the game was published and made available for lawful purchase by Nintendo.
Many of the pirate websites specifically noted the ability to play the game file in Yuzu. – the lawsuit.
As mentioned above, this is hardly the first time that an emulator has found itself in Nintendo’s crossfire. If you incorrectly think that this is just a scare tactic, one that Nintendo will back down from – oh, how wrong you are.
Gary Bowser is an unfortunate example of just how far Nintendo is willing to go. If the name isn’t familiar to you, the aptly named Gary Bowser was part of a group that targeted Nintendo devices and enabled users to play ROM games on the Nintendo Switch and 3DS.
For his part in the operation, Gary Bowser, then 53, was fined $14.5 million, sentenced to 40 months in prison and will have 25-30% of his future wages garnished for the rest of his life.
In their latest lawsuit, Nintendo also accused Yuzu of spoiling Tears of the Kingdom, saying that because of the prevalence of emulators, many fans were forced to avoid social media and also:
To be clear, there is no lawful way to use Yuzu to play Nintendo Switch games, because it must decrypt the games’ encryption. – Nintendo
According to the lawsuit, the damage caused to Nintendo by Yuzu is irreparable, but they aim to try anyway. Nintendo is looking for a permanent injunction against the emulator, the surrender of the yuzu-emu.org website and monetary damages.
As of writing, Nintendo is looking for $2,500 per violation of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions and $150,000 per violation of Nintendo’s copyright, which could make this Nintendo’s most financially deadly lawsuit yet.