Citra, a 3DS emulator, has just gone dark as collateral damage to the Yuzu VS Nintendo lawsuit settlement.
As previously reported, last week, Nintendo 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.
Nintendo was looking for a permanent injunction against the emulator, the surrender of the yuzu-emu.org website and monetary damages, which included $2,500 per violation of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions and $150,000 per violation of Nintendo’s copyright.
But that was last week; this week, Yuzu entered a surprise settlement with Nintendo. In the settlement, Yuzu agreed to pay Nintendo a whopping $2.4 million in damages and cease the development and distribution of the emulator.
As a result of the above, Citra, a 3DS emulator that shared developers with Yuzu, has said its final goodbye this morning.
In an X on X, Citra posted a message initially shared in the Yuzu Discord that said that Yuzu and Yuzu’s support of Citra is being discontinued, effective immediately.
— Citra (@citraemu) March 4, 2024
The Github repository holding Citra’s code has also gone dark. For those who might not know, Citra predated Yuzu by several years and, after debuting in 2014, had become the de facto emulator for playing the 3DS handheld on PCs and Android phones.
The reason for it going down, even though Nintendo never mentioned it in the lawsuit, is because the lawsuit was technically targeting Tropic Haze, LLC.
Tropic Haze was a company that the Yuzu developers formed to facilitate handling Patreon income. Since the two emulators share the same founders, Citra was collateral damage.
In the settlement, the Yuzsu developers agreed to surrender and permanently cease using any other website or system that Defendant or its members own or control, directly or indirectly, that involves Nintendo’s Intellectual Property to Plaintiff’s control.
While Citra is dead under its current name, it could be returning. Citra is open-source with many contributors, many of whom have no ties to Yuzu’s developers, meaning we’re likely to see its return in the future, just under a different name with different developers.
If this lawsuit and Nintendo’s previous ones have taught us anything at all, it’s that people don’t learn that Nintendo is one company that’s best left alone.