Tropic Haze, popular Yuzu Nintendo Switch emulator developer, has apparently agreed to settle Nintendo’s lawsuit against him. Nintendo agreed to pay $2.4 million to the maker of Tropic Haze Mario in a joint final judgment on Tuesday, less than a week after Nintendo filed a lawsuit accusing the emulator’s creators of “large-scale piracy.” list of concessions.
Nintendo’s lawsuit alleged that Tropic Haze violated anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). “Unauthorized copies of the game could not be played on computers or Android devices without decrypting Yuzu’s Nintendo encryption,” the company wrote in its complaint. He described Yuzu as “software primarily designed to evade technological events.”
Yuzu was launched in 2018 as free, open source software for Windows, Linux, and Android. It can run countless copyrighted Switch games, including those from console vendors The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the kingdom, Super Mario Odyssey and Super Mario Miracle. Reddit threads Comparing Switch emulators, he praised Yuzu’s performance compared to competitors like Ryujinx. The Yuzu introduces different bugs on different titles, but it can usually handle games at higher resolutions than the Switch, often at better frame rates, as long as your hardware is powerful enough.
As part of Exhibit A attached to the offer cohabitation, Tropic Haze has agreed to a number of accommodations. In addition to paying Nintendo $2.4 million, it must forever refrain from “activities involving the offering, marketing, distribution, or sale of the Yuzu emulator or any similar software that circumvents Nintendo’s technical safeguards.”
Tropic Haze must also remove all circumvention devices, tools and Nintendo cryptographic keys used in the emulator and surrender all circumvention devices and modified Nintendo hardware. It must even hand over the emulator’s web domain (including any variants or successors) to Nintendo. (The website is still live, possibly pending a final court order.) Failure to comply with the terms of the settlement could subject Tropic Haze to contempt of court, including punitive, injunctive, and monetary actions.
While piracy is the primary motivation for many emulator users, software can double as essential tools video game protection – Rapid legal submission of Tropic Haze as potentially problematic. Without emulators, Nintendo and other copyright holders can make games obsolete for future generations, as older hardware eventually becomes harder to find.
Nintendo’s legal team is certainly no stranger to aggressively enforcing copyrighted material. In recent years, the company has followed suit Change pirate sites, ROM sharing site RomUniverse sued 2 million dollars and helped send hacker Gary Bowser to prison. Although Valve’s work, Nintendo’s reputation gained indirectly Dolphin Wii and GameCube emulator blocked from Steam. It’s safe to say that Mario’s maker doesn’t share preservationists’ views on the important historical role that emulators can play.
Despite the settlement, it’s unlikely that open-source Yuzu will disappear entirely. The emulator is still available on GitHub, where its entire codebase can be found.
