Pizza Emulator - a Nintendo emulator for Android known for their Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Color emulators is shutting down. They pulled their apps from the Play Store this past Friday.
The creator of Pizza Emulator said in a discord message,
“Dear friends and supporters,
After seven incredible years of development and adventures with my apps, I have made the difficult decision to remove them permanently from the Play Store."
He then goes on to explain his reason for the sudden decision.
"My family comes first, and for this reason, I have chosen to prioritize my family over the development of my apps.”
David, the man behind Pizza Emulator, would conclude his Discord message with a thanks saying:
“I want to thank each and every one of you for your incredible support over the years. Your words of encouragement, feedback, and constant support have been a source of inspiration for me and my work." He closes with gratitude, "Thank you again for everything. You have been fantastic.”
Earlier a popular Nintendo Switch emulator called Yuzu had to shut down their services and had to pay $2.4M to Nintendo for a lawsuit settlement. However, the statement on Discord made no mention of that being a factor.
Yuzu’s closure was followed by the closing of Citra - a popular 3DS emulator. Nintendo stated that the emulators facilitated piracy on a huge scale. While Yuzu would be considered to be unethical by most as it allows you to play commercially available games for free, the shutting down of Citra is concerning as it only existed as a way to play inactive archived Nintendo games.
We've also seen the archiving of CD Romance, one of the primary archiving websites for retro games and mods.
The Nintendo community has raised concerns previously on the archiving and storage of discontinued games, especially since the closure of the 3DS eShop in March 2023 - which made the whole catalogue of the handheld device unavailable.
You can find out more about the latest Nintendo stock price drop here and read about the Nvidia 3DS prototype found in Nintendo Gigaleak files.