Tropic Haze LLC, representing the developers of the open-source Yuzu emulator, has reached an agreement with Nintendo to drop the litigation in exchange for a complete shutdown of the emulator's development, the closure of all resources associated with it, and payment of compensation in the amount of $2.4 million. In addition to Yuzu, a Nintendo Switch emulator, Citra, a Nintendo 3DS emulator developed by the same development team, was also affected by the cessation of development.
Currently, the content of the Yuzu and Citra sites has been removed, and a message to users has been posted on the main page. Project repositories have also been removed from GitHub. In the near future, there are plans to shut down the Discord servers, delete the Patreon page, and transfer the rights to the domains to Nintendo. Representatives from the community have already tried to create a fork of Yuzu - Nuzu, but it is not yet clear how Nintendo will react to it and whether its founders will be able to support the project at the proper level. The Ryujinx project, which is developing another Nintendo Switch emulator, also remains in operation.
In their address to users, the Yuzu developers stated that they did not intend to cause harm through their activities and developed the project out of love for computer games and Nintendo game consoles. At the same time, they admit that the software they developed contributed to the development of piracy of games for Nintendo, as it made it possible to bypass technical protection and play without using authorized equipment. The developers apologized to users, condemned the use of pirated copies of video games and expressed hope that their decision would be a small step towards eradicating piracy.
To prevent the launch of pirated copies of games and protect against copying of games, Nintendo consoles use cryptographic keys to encrypt the contents of the firmware and game files. Nintendo owns or controls the copyright in games for its consoles and is responsible for licensing the distribution of games for its devices. The game's terms of use only allow play on your gaming console and prohibit the use of unauthorized devices.
According to Nintendo's lawyers, the use of an emulator leads to an illegal bypass of methods of technical protection of access to content that is subject to copyright. To run the game in the Yuzu emulator, you must have keys to decrypt the game files. Despite the fact that retrieving game decryption keys is the responsibility of users and is done using third-party tools, the very fact of decryption on the emulator side is perceived by Nintendo as an illegal bypass of technical protection measures. Even if a user uses keys extracted from their own purchased copy, this violates the terms of use, which prohibit the creation of copies to run on other platforms.
Source: opennet.ru