Nintendo lawyers are suing Tropic Haze LLC, the company behind the popular Switch emulator Yuzu.
As spotted by journalist Stephen Totilo on X, and uploaded in full to Scribed, the suit also directly calls out the lead developer and 3DS emulator Citra creator Bunnei several times.
“As ‘project lead,’ Bunnei has knowledge of and directs the conduct of each of the several other developers who contribute to Yuzu. For instance, Yuzu’s website has a blog that includes at least monthly updates on the status of development of the emulator, including what each developer has worked on that month and what improvements have been made to the emulation of specific games. Bunnei is regularly featured in the monthly updates.” – Nintendo.
One of the main arguments put forth by Nintendo is that currently, there is no legal way to play dumped Switch games. I know some of you are going to hear this and argue that dumping your own games is perfectly legal, but there’s more to it than that. At least from Nintendo’s viewpoint anyway.
Nintendo argues that by using software to rip the cryptographic keys (the prod.keys) from an owned Switch console, you’re actively infringing on Nintendo’s copyright. What copyright specifically? That’d be Nintendo’s copyrighted code that stops Switch games from working on anything that isn’t a Switch.
Nintendo also puts forward the argument that many who sail the high seas will actually avoid ripping their own keys and will instead just download them from the Internet and that Yuzu facilitates this in a way.
Nintendo’s problems with the use of the prod.keys isn’t something new. Back in 2023, Nintendo allegedly issued a DMCA takedown notice to the Lockpick GitHub page (the page is no longer available). Lockpick was, and still is, the go-to piece of software modders would use to rip their prod.keys from the Switch console.
Regarding piracy, Nintendo claims Tears of the Kingdom was downloaded over one million times from piracy websites and then went on to be played via Yuzu. Nintendo did not say how it tracked this data, or how many illegal copies were used on hacked Switch consoles, or alternative emulator Ryujinx, or how many of the pirates went on to purchase the game afterward.
“As to piracy, for instance, one recent major Nintendo video game, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, was unlawfully distributed a week and a half before its release by Nintendo. 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. Defendant’s development and distribution of Yuzu to the public materially contributes to and induces those third parties to infringe the copyrights in Nintendo’s games.” – Nintendo.
The Yuzu team has yet to comment publicly on the matter in detail, but a bot on the Yuzu Discord channel offers up the following response when developers are tagged regarding the lawsuit.
“We do not know anything other than the public filing, and we are not able to discuss the matter at this time.” – Yuzu
As always, I’ll be keeping an eye on this matter as it evolves.
