Nintendo has taken down another emulator. Yuzu was just sued and will pay and turn over their code to Nintendo. The Yuzu team in a way gave them the perfect argument in that the emulator gets around the switches security, this isn’t uncommon for emulators. The difference was they had game fixes for leaked games behind a paywall.

My issue with the whole situation is the timing. Nintendo has known about Yuzu for a while, why now? The code was open source, so they knew how it worked. They waited seven years and 140 million consoles later to take action. I feel as if they’re trying to sponge up the last drops of water and sell some more consoles. This isn’t going to stop leaks from Nintendo, Zelda and Mario Wonder got leaked and were playable on Ryujinx too. The difference is Ryujinx didn’t paywall fixes for leaked games.

I Nintendo should come out and clarify why they did this because gamers have been butting heads with them for years. Right now unless you understand, it looks like big bad Nintendo has come in and made another crummy business decision. I don’t think they will, they hate emulators and will look for anyway to take them down. Six other projects have restarted to continue the project.

Piracy is rampant on PC and there’s always justifications you hear for it. A PC gamer once told us that piracy is the same as buying used games on console. I’m not sure how but, the real question should be asked especially with the emulators of old games, is when is piracy fine? For us if the game is out of print, no longer being sold, devs out of business or it’s generations old, who is being hurt? If I buy them online or at a local game store, devs nor publishers get that money.

Surprisingly, Sony is still porting to PC. We’ve heard its games are setting records for the amount of piracy. Not many people will play a game then support the devs. We’re somewhat guilty of this, but we will support sequels and the devs other work. If it’s something we own on console we’ll download and look at the differences for a bit, then delete it.

The switch was one of a few consoles to have a good functioning emulator during its lifespan. There’s people who are thinking this is the start of emulators being taken down. This is not the case, as most emulate old games and no one is losing anything.