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Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu
(news.bloomberglaw.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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Brother.. Nintendo's net income last year was 3.1 BILLION dollars. There is no "fighting Nintendo".
Let's be real homie. Yuzu is done. Downvote me all you want after I post this.
As much as we all love Yuzu, the dev's had to have known this was coming.
I don't want to be one of those dudes that keeps harping on the "Nintendo should be FOR preserving old games". We all know Nintendo will continue to kick down ANYONE so much as glancing in their I.P. 's general direction.
Nintendo does what you Nintendon't want. Always.
Extreme capitalism stifles and suffocates innovation and preservation.
They didn't expect it to happen because of all of the landmark rulings in the past that emulators are inherently not illegal unless they provide bios to the end user. The only reason why Nintendo is acting now instead of years ago when Yuzu first hit the scene is because it's in basically a fully working state now and they somehow verified that 1,000,000 people downloaded TOTK. I suspect far more copies of BOTW and Mario Odyssey were downloaded prior.
The thing is whatever beef they might rightfully have with 1,000,000 people pirating TotK, it's not the emulator who's to blame. The ones who distributed pirated copies are. They are trying to pin it entirely on the wrong group, out of convenience/intimidation.
This is like suing a motorcycle company because a thief used one as a getaway vehicle.
I believe the issue is that Yuzu was patched to support TotK before TotK was released, which could suggest having used some proprietary code, or at least stuff that the devs shouldn't have had access to.
They could also make the argument that very few people would've downloaded the game if the emulator didn't exist or at least wasn't being patched to support a game before it releases.
They definitely didn't lose 1,000,000 sales. At the same time, I feel like it kind of crosses a line to be pirating a game before it's even supposed to be sold in stores.
I've heard people saying just the opposite. It couldn't run TotK before official release, and whoever made it run had to modify it independently (because it's an open source project)
Arguing that people wouldn't have downloaded it if not for the emulator, not only once again assigns blame to the wrong party ("if they didn't have motorcycles to get away they might not have stolen it"), but it overlooks that there are modded Switches that can run pirated copies too.
Pirating stuff before it's even out for sale is pretty sketchy, but Yuzu is not the one doing it. It simply lets people play copies they already have, including those they may have dumped themselves. Nintendo is encroaching on customer ownership rights by trying to argue even doing that is infringing.
edit: Maybe my analogy is lacking because one might argue that they rely on the tool to make use of the illicitly acquired thing, which is not necessarily true for a motorcycle. But if we say instead "the bluray player is to blame that people shoplifted" or "the media player is to blame that people downloaded pirated movies", then I believe it should be even more clear that they are accusing the wrong party.
The only way for Nintendo's reasoning to work is if they try to argue that not even someone who dumps their own roms and extracts their own keys from their own console ought to have the right to do it. Which would be disastrous for customer rights and preservation. Nintendo cannot be allowed to get away with that.
I've said this before and I'll say it now: I bet most of those 1,000,000 people would have never bought a copy of the game anyway.
Pretty much, piracy are never lost sales. Either the person is extremely passionate and loving of the product so they'll buy it anyway regardless if they pirated it or not; or they were just tasting the flavor of the week and never intended to buy it under any circumstance; or they are extremely poor/their economy and context doesn't allow them to access the product legitimately, so they wouldn't be capable of buying it even if they wanted; or the product is not legitimately available anymore, so pirating is the only way of accessing it.
Piracy is never a lost sale.
You were downvoted by a nintendo shill.
I bought the game and I still considered emulating it just to run it at higher res.
This is something that makes the Nintendo numbers bullshit. how many of those 1mill downloads were people who already owned/purchased the game? How many of those people don't even have a switch and would have never purchased the game to begin with?
I'm thinking of it so I can play older patches of the game.
Out of interest, at a high level, why?
Did they patch out interesting exploits/speed run things?
There's some easy duplication glitches.
And some of them probably did buy the game, even
And many more who were friends of acquaintances of the downloader.
I wonder if Nintendo released their games outside of their own ecosystem if that number would still be as high
I haven't yet. Sounds like I should add to that statistic.
It's an inherent contradiction of capitalist competition. Somehow everyone is supposed to be competitive but noone is supposed to win for capitalism to "work". Otherwise it's considered a monopoly and "anti-competitive".
Ironically this requires collaboration.
I had a feeling my adjective was too much.
The way you explain it makes me picture an ouroboros where, instead of the snake eating it's ass, it's the ass eating the snake.
I kind of doubt this because Yuzu doesn't actually have any of the cryptographic key material that Nintendo could have a valid reason to sue over. They only offer instructions to dump keys, which has to be argued is causing harm because its completely legal to do on consoles and games that you own.
Dolphin ships with the Wii's AES key but Nintendo never pursued them in court.
Most likely Nintendo won't get anywhere and only get Yuzu to remove some wiki pages and stuff which will make it slightly harder to use or slow down development by threatening more lawsuits.
Nintendo know this. What everyone seems to be missing is that defending yourself in lawsuits also costs money.
Apple does this shit all the time.
I'd like to seem them dump all those dollars in a legal battle they can't win. Imagine if they succeed with the judge. They will lose their audience.