Nintendo and Yuzu creators reach settlement, emulator will shut down

A sad Mario next to the Yuzu emulator logo
Credit: Nintendo/Yuzu

A sad Mario next to the Yuzu emulator logo
Credit: Nintendo/Yuzu

A week after Nintendo launched a lawsuit against the Yuzu emulator creators it has been revealed that both parties reached a settlement that will see Tropic Haze, the company behind Yuzu, pay Nintendo $2.4 million as well as the discontinuation of the emulation project.

The information was shared by Game File's Stephen Totilo, who revealed that on top of handing Nintendo millions of dollars as compensation and shutting down Yuzu, the current Yuzu website will also become Nintendo's.

Yuzu creators intended the emulator to serve as a means of preserving retro titles that aren't easily available on Nintendo's platforms. Sadly, users utilised Yuzu to pirate new releases, with Nintendo using Tears of the Kingdom as an example of how the emulator was a tool to enable piracy at a large scale.

The Yuzu owners issued a statement via social media confirming that support for both the Yuzu emulator and Citra, a Nintendo 3DS emulator, will be discontinued. The code repositories will go offline, the Patreon accounts and Discord servers will be closed, and finally, both the Yuzu and Citra websites will be shut down.

Princess Zelda holding the master sword in Tears of the Kingdom
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Credit: Nintendo
Tears of the Kingdom was leaked before it released

"Yuzu and its team have always been against piracy. We started the projects in good faith, out of passion for Nintendo and its consoles and games, and were not intending to cause harm. But we see now that because our projects can circumvent Nintendo's technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy."

The Nintendo lawsuit mentioned how their latest Zelda title, Tears of the Kingdom, was not only pirated more than 1 million times but that it had allowed content to leak before it was officially released.

The Yuzu statement added: "We have been deeply disappointed when users have used our software to leak game content prior to its release and ruin the experience for legitimate purchasers and fans."

If you were one of those who used Yuzu for its intended purpose, then it'll be a sad thing to see it go out the way it is. But it's hard to blame Nintendo when the company is well within its right to take action.