Nintendo doing Nintendo things. Again.

Nintendo is one of the oldest gaming companies in existence, and because it’s homebase is in Japan, Japanese gaming companies in general have the tendency to be very greedy, and just downright old-fashioned where no one else but Nintendo can do anything with their games and that’s their right. That’s their prerogative. They can do that whenever they want, but it’s not making it easier for them to connect to their community, and community creations are at the heart of why games last for as long as they do.

This time, it’s all about Yuzu.. Yuzu is an experimental open-source emulator for the Nintendo Switch that was released in 2018. This company also created Citra, an emulator for the Nintendo 3DS. All is well in the world right? Everyone has access to Nintendo games but here comes the long arm of the Nintendo law. Unfortunately.

So just over a week ago, Nintendo sued the developers of course for quote-unquote, “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale.” Yuzu doesn’t offer pirated or leaked games itself, but Nintendo targeted the company because the emulator is one of the few ways to play those games. Now, Yuzu owes Nintendo after reaching a $2.4 million settlement along with one of the harshest terms of the settlement that Tropic Haze will have to stop operations on Yuzu entirely — it can’t distribute it in any way, nor can it market it on its website or social media. Yuzu will also have to give up its domain name.

Yuzu sent out a statement published on their Discord, and their social media:

“.. Piracy was never our intention, and we believe that piracy of video games and on video game consoles should end. Effective today, we will be pulling our code repositories offline, discontinuing our Patreon accounts and Discord servers, and, soon, shutting down our websites. We hope our actions will be a small step toward ending piracy of all creators’ works.”

This lawsuit has spurred up again the age-old debate on emulation — whether the act is illegal. It’s a very gray area of course, I think of this as game preservation, preserving that games that don’t exist now in any store can still be played.

So all in all this is just a problem of service. I always say this to my friends: Piracy is a service problem.

People pirate games because there’s no service that has them. If Nintendo properly ported all their old games to newer systems after each console release, I know it takes a lot of effort and time to do so, it will pay off massively because people are willing to pay for it. Nothing beats nostalgia and nothing beats retaining your existing customers.