Let's say, hypothetically, that I'm not a Nintendo spy. Let's also say that, still hypothetically, I would be interested in, or curious about, maybe, what would have been your first choice. Would you hypothetically tell it to me?

Not talking about pirating anything, btw. Just making hypotheses about a purely imaginary scenario.

Or Japan for that matter

In my experience, practically none of the people who care about Nintendo suing Yuzu were buying Nintendo games anyways.

So they're not losing any sales if those people boycott buying their games. But on the other side, they probably weren't losing any significant percentage of sales to Yuzu either.

Emulation makers need to move to non extradition countries and improve their op-sec

I mean they were doomed when they started asking for money in addition to pointing people how to break encryption and stuff so you can play those definitely your copies of TotK that was leaked

Not just that, but their website included instructions on how to dump encryption keys. Reverse engineering a console is perfectly legal and Nintendo has historically left emulators alone, but all the other emulator developers were smart enough to advertise that their emulator was for homebrew purposes only and remove any talk of privacy from their forums. All that information is easily supplemented by the community so including it on your official site is just plain stupid. Emulator development needs to be centralized so you need to play dumb. The illegal stuff can go to side communities where they have to play whack a mole. Yuzu folded without putting up a fight because they know they fucked up.

Agreed. But in this case, yuzu is literaly the first result for "switch emulator" so nindento could probably find it on their own

"tech" YouTuber challenge of shutting the fuck up

Level: impossible

No. The dissemination of knowledge is important. No, don’t post direct links to obviously illegal material. But discussing piracy is critical to the system’s existence.

Besides, Yuzu was an emulator. Emulation is legal. We are totally right to discuss Yuzu. The emulator itself wasn’t what got them in trouble.

Yeah but I doubt it's the developers going after emulators like this. It's the higher ups and legal teams I imagine.

Nintendo doesn't care. They stay in their lane and they are strategic about each move.

I remember hearing about pretty terrible corporate culture as they demand obedience and swear you to secrecy. I think I remember some guy mentioned he worked at Nintendo on a podcast and they instantly fired him to make a point.

What Nintendo does care about is knockoffs. At their core they are toymakers who make collectibles. What is a knockoff? Anything that Nintendo deems so.

There are three issues here:

1. The leaked ROM of Tears of the Kingdom and a .nfo that specifically told people to use Yuzu
2. The developers recently released an Android version that works really, really well. There are many Android based gaming handhelds on the market now, and several are powerful enough to run Switch games using Native Code Execution (think virtual machine for ARM). Switch emulation was being used as a benchmark in techie videos of these products! TotK still isn't great on the most powerful ones, but give it another year or two, and you'll get the full Switch experience without a Switch.
3. The developers fucking sold the emulator. Sure, it was only for early access, but a sale is a sale. Then there the whole patreon thing.

Those three things combined put Yuzu right in Nintendo's sights

They may or may not know about them, but when someone higher up gets embarrassed, such as TOTK being streamed before launch, that creates a lot of pressure to act

Companies aren't people either. Did someone at Nintendo know about this? Undoubtedly. I'm sure plenty of them did, they're a big company and emulators for their old content are like the #1 gaming emulators.

Their lawyers and leadership may have known in a vague sense, but they're probably not technical. Something got them in a room together to see if they could do something about this... It wasn't because they lost money (I doubt they did), it was because they looked bad in front of shareholders

I'll preface this by saying fuck Nintendo, this is really bad precedent and I'm so pissed this went through. The judgement against them was seriously insane... They built a tool that was legal (at least before now), and were fined $1.6 million, had to give up everything with the name yuzu, had to give up all of their personal Nintendo products, and there were a few other things... It's truly insane IP is being protected to this extent.

But conversely, people were way too public with the TOTK leak. Teach your friends and family how to sail the high seas, talk about it in niche corners, drop theoretical knowledge on strangers in quiet corners of the web.

The high seas are an open secret... It's fine if most everyone uses it, especially when companies make their own products uncompetitive with the hassle of alternative means. But, we have to pretend in public, at least a little

If it's out in the open, someone is going to push IP law even further. Not for moral or profit reasons, purely because a win will make them look strong and an embarrassment makes them look weak.

And that makes stock prices dance for a bit.

For further context the phrase was largely leveraged to stop the spread of bad news on the war front. They were fairly confident that a German spy network didn't exist within American society at the time of the campaign, but didn't want negative press to circulate about the war effort.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loose_lips_sink_ships

It is their job, but, sometimes (I'm speaking in general terms, not specifically about Nintendo), it's better to pretend it doesn't exist, especially because of the Streisand Effect. But, if someone from outside tells them something exists, they might be legally obligated to take action in order to maintain certain legal protections on their properties in the future.

From what I understand this happened to Yuzu recently (and that's probably what this post is referring to), where, supposedly, some angry person found a bunch of Nintendo email addresses and emailed them all about Yuzu.

I've also seen it happen at least one other time, too. Cartoon Network used to have an old MMO called FusionFall (not FusionFall Heroes). It was shutdown several years ago, but a community of devs decided to remake the game, and they were even working on upgrading the graphics. They were making some really significant progress on it. Some guy apparently got banned from it, though. (It was in a public beta.) And they emailed Cartoon Network about it. Cartoon Network sent a Cease & Desist, and it disappeared immediately.