It is no secret that Nintendo has been very strict on fan content. It is also no secret that Nintendo is not a fan of any kind of piracy or emulation whatsoever. The company has a record going back for many years of trying to put a stop to both. So, it isn’t surprising that a new example of this has been announced today.
Gaming journalist Stephen Totilo has confirmed on Twitter that Nintendo is suing the creators of Yuzu, a Switch emulator. Nintendo is arguing that the emulator “illegally circumvents Nintendo’s software encryption and facilitates piracy”. They’re wanting damages for violations and the emulator to be shutdown.
Nintendo also mentions The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, saying that the emulator “spoiled the game” and harmed “law-abiding Nintendo customers”, making them “avoid social media to prevent seeing spoilers and preserve their surprise and delight for the actual game release”, citing a few fan comments in the process.
Nintendo also cited the game as an example of their argument that the emulator facilitates piracy, saying that 1,000,000 copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom were downloaded prior to its release and that “Yuzu’s Patreon support doubled during that time”. You can see Totilo’s tweet about the matter down below.
This will probably be an unpopular opinion but maybe emulators shouldn’t be allowed for current market consoles. Seems like that would settle the issue and still allow gamers to preserve software after official support ends for a console.
Yeah but if you do that, then you have devs arguing stuff like Xbox 360 or PS4, or even Wii U are “current Gen” and it blocks games from being preserved.
Piracy isn’t actually a big money loser for most game companies (Zelda ToK sold 20 million) so honestly they can cry about it. The Switch is the best selling console ever, I doubt it actually affects sales
*is probably going to be the best selling console
well 1 000 000.00$ X 30 usd = 60 000 000$ so it does affect even if they are rich
x 60 usd $
I would say make the rule something like… if you can no longer find a new copy for MSRP(or lower) in stores, then it’s free to emulate. Perhaps there can be a certain threshold number of how many are left when the rule no longer applies.
This would of course be assuming that the game isn’t available on the console’s digital store as well.
We’re talking about hardware emulation though
The question here is that the emulators doesn’t fit to the console market because it will destroy the cost of their game development and Nintendo don’t want any type of IP to be sabotage or damage by any form of content related to their IP. When you create something for a company or studio you work with, they own the entire IP and want it to be protected no matter the circumstances.
I wouldn’t have emulated Tears of The Kingdom if Nintendo hadn’t been asking for 70 god damn dollars for it.
Sorry but $70 for TotK is justified, $70 for CoD is not.
Just don’t play the game if you think it’s expensive, you thief.
Shut up beta
“$60 in 2014 is worth $77.74 today”, according to Inflation Calculator. Prices of games today are being more and more adjusted for inflation.
Sure you wouldn’t have. If your mortality rests on a $10 difference then your parents did a bad job.
If only they ran some promotion on the eShop to get game cheapest with vouchers… Or retailers regularly sold eShop cards at a discount….
nah, you can find it for much less than that, you’re a just prick trying to justify it.
trying to use “it spoiled the game so it hurts Law Abiding Customers too” as a justification for shutting down an emulator is really funny considering yuzu existing has nothing to do with the game getting leaked. it’s not like yuzu is the only way to play pirated switch games.
nintendo is obviously within their rights to do this but pretending that this is in any beneficial to the consumer is just silly. it is a purely self-serving move.
i think it’s also worth noting just in general that nintendo is not your friend and doesn’t care about you and would sell your soul for a buck if they could. equating legality with morality is silly. the current economic conditions in the US are literally worse than they were during the great depression. if someone can’t afford to pay $70 for a game and decided to pirated it instead, that isn’t $70 nintendo would have gotten if they didn’t pirate.
Me and my friend debated this and like I told him unless they got paperwork it doesn’t matter if fans agree or not you can’t just use people IPs, Ideas, or anything on file/paper without permission. I know people feel sales won’t drop but it’s about principle there is a reason people pay to patent an idea/brands and that is so other people can’t use it without authorization or copy it. If other companies want to port it over just come with a deal that Nintendo can’t refuse.
Play with fire and you get burned. A simple rule that counts for anything in life.
But there are still people who think that piracy is only a small nuisance for companies?? 1 million pirated games is 1 million unsold games and it doesn’t concern just one game but several, so the losses are in the billions… It should come as no surprise that we only have long sequels or remakes or that the price of games goes up because yes, the cost of piracy is passed on to the cost of games!
And Nintendo is clearly within its rights, piracy is theft,end of story
Question: If I were to “pirate” Breath of the Wild just to play it on PC so I could put a Shrek mod in the game. Would that be a lost game sale? Even if I already own a legitimate copy? What if I just screwed around for 20 minutes and never returned to the game after?
There have been studies on this, most people who pirate, wouldn’t have bought the game regardless. It wouldn’t be a million lost sales, it might be like 10,000 lost sales, and in some cases, the pirates buy the game after they’ve tried it so it can actually help some developers
Gotta do what’s right for your business.
Let’s be real, most people using that emulator are pirating (aka stealing) every game they play on it.
I don’t have any sympathy for free loaders/thieves. If we all did that for everything, these companies we enjoy would go out of business.
There’s nuance to this stuff, but gamers are too stupid to realize that. Mostly due to immaturity and self entitlement.
+megamansurvives
You do know you can support emulation and be against piracy, right?
Emulation is still legal and not only that, it improves on the hardware and performance, I despise people pirating new games but emulation is not just “free games” if you legally bought a copy of tears of the kingdom and you own a switch you should be free to boot it up on yuzu and play that on 4k 60fps. I’m not giving up on emulation just because so bad people are gonna use it just to pirate new games
It’s hard to undersell both how petty and, by extension, how cartoonishly evil this move is. Unsatisfied with the unfathomable sales of their decrepit hardware (which can’t even run their own games without major and persistent performance issues), and tens of millions of copies of even some of the most embarrassing software they’ve ever crapped out (modern Pokemon), they’ve deemed it an utter necessity to squeeze the last bit of blood from the stone: the amorphous and unquantifiable phantom market of sales lost to emulation. Even still, rather than tackling this “problem” in an honest and forthright way, such as heeding the obvious consumer demand and providing their own official releases of their games on PC on a few years’ delay, they’ve opted for the lazier route, to just attack your rights instead.
The good news is they’ll be fighting an uphill battle against well-established precedents. The bad news is that American courts in recent years tend to be so tech-illiterate, and so unaccountable to anything other than the bottom-lines of massive tech corporations, that any outcome is possible. Worse still, Nintendo probably doesn’t even need to see this lawsuit through to a verdict. If they can score a preliminary injunction against Yuzu for the duration of the trial — heck, maybe even without it — it seems unlikely that Yuzu can afford the years of legal proceedings. Short of a guardian angel donor funding their defense, Yuzu is probably screwed, no matter the flimsiness of Nintendo’s legal arguments. “The process is the punishment,” and adherence to the actual law, let alone to the underlying principle, is a distant afterthought.
But… legal precedent was set when Sony tried to sue a Playstation emulator
To be honest, I hope Nintendo Looses. Not because I am in favour of piracy, but emulation is the only way of preserving games. If they win there could be a precedent for taking down other projects.
How is pirating currently sold games “preserving them”? They are being sold in stores still and regular prices…. People where playing that Pokemon and etc weeks earlier than release…
Emulation is eh .. piracy isn’t…that’s bad
Emulation and piracy are different things. Please understand what I am trying to say before changing my words.
@Rosalina That is like saying we should sue all gun makers just because people use them to commit crimes. If you are against piracy, you go after the guys distributing ROMs of currently sold games. Not the guys making an effort to create a platform to continue playing switch games long after they are stop being sold.
+Lady rosalina
Nice to see you’re still on here putting people’s words in their mouths and deliberately being ignorant to parts of the picture that aren’t convenient to your agenda :)
Or maybe not everyone wanted to play TotK.
I own a switch and didn’t even bother buying TotK.
As someone who has bought and played every single Zelda game I just don’t find BotW or TotK fun or appealing.
I hate games where your weapons break after only using it a few times, that was the main reason I didn’t bother to buy TotK.
I’ve seen plenty of other people complain about the exact same issue, even members of my family said they hated the easily breakable weapon mechanic in both games and refuse to buy TotK due to that.
If anyone is to blame for TotK not selling as many copies as BotW it’s Nintendo for ignoring fan feedback on this garbage weapon degradation mechanic they were so hell bent on implementing in the sequel after e eryone complained about it being in the first game.
This may not be the only reason TotK didn’t sell as many copies as BroW, but it was certainly one of the factors as to why it didn’t sell as many copies.
There is a reason why even Fromsoftware games, from DS1, DS2, Bloodborne, and DS3, never implemented the weapons degradation mechanic from their previous games into Elden Ring, because weapons breaking in an open world game is an idiotic idea, especially for an open world game.
There isn’t a single gamer in this world that would choose to have a mechanic in their game that break their weapons, especially only after a few uses.
So no, Yuzu didn’t hurt the sales of TotK, Nintendo did with their terrible implementation of weapon degradation that 99 percent of gamers hate, period.
Here’s the problem with Nintendo’s method of dealing with this; They are going after the wrong people.
Yuzu doesn’t condone piracy, they explain in detail how to dump your own game that you legally paid for.
But unfortunately a lot of people don’t do it that way and just illegally download the game and run it on Yuzu. Nintendo shouldn’t be going after Yuzu, they should be going after the people/sites that are hosting these games.
Granted the method of dumping your game is a gray area as to whether or not it’s legal but honestly it’s stupid for Nintendo to care at that point, the people paid for it, Nintendo got their bottom line, so long as the people use their dumped game for personal use only and don’t upload it online so people can download it, there is no reason for Nintendo to throw a fit over this.
Yuzu was somewhat targeted by Nintendo it seems from all the aftermath, I mean they weren’t providing the ROM files or Firmware files were they? Sure showing how to dump games etc may be a gray area but what if you are dumping from your own Switch console. A lot is UNCLEAR!
Nintendo may have unfairly targeted Yuzu, as the emulator didn’t provide ROM or firmware files directly. While showing how to dump games could be considered a gray area, it raises questions about legality if the dumping is done from a personally owned Switch. Overall, the situation is portrayed as unclear.