Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu will utterly fold and pay $2.4M to settle its lawsuit

Just over a week ago, Nintendo sued the developers of the leading Nintendo Switch emulator, Yuzu, for “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale.” Now, it appears that Yuzu will give up without a fight — and give Nintendo everything it wanted. And it affects the Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra, too.

According to a joint filing, Tropic Haze has not only agreed to pay $2,400,000 to Nintendo but also says Yuzu is “primarily designed to circumvent and play Nintendo Switch games.” The company agrees to be permanently enjoined from working on Yuzu, hosting Yuzu, distributing Yuzu’s code or features, hosting websites and social media that promote Yuzu, or doing anything else that circumvents Nintendo’s copyright protection.

Oh, and it will surrender the yuzu-emu.org domain name to Nintendo, agree to delete not only its copies of Yuzu but also “all circumvention tools used for developing or using Yuzu—such as TegraRcmGUI, Hekate, Atmosphère, Lockpick_RCM, NDDumpTool, nxDumpFuse, and TegraExplorer,” and hand over any “physical circumvention devices” and “modified Nintendo hardware” to Nintendo. It also agrees to not delete any other “evidence” that infringes Nintendo’s IP rights.

Yuzu and Citra developer Bunnei confirmed in the Yuzu discord that both the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo 3DS emulators are affected. “We write today to inform you that yuzu and yuzu’s support of Citra are being discontinued, effective immediately,” it begins:

It’s not yet clear if this is the literal end of Yuzu or Citra, since copies of both emulators and their source code are in the wild. Some online supporters specifically mentioned backing up the Yuzu code after Nintendo sued two weeks ago.

I’m also not clear on whether this result could impact other emulators beyond Yuzu and Citra. If Yuzu had fought this lawsuit in court, one of the biggest questions would have been whether Yuzu is actually circumventing Nintendo’s protections since the emulator itself does not contain Nintendo’s keys. (Yuzu is a “bring-your-own-BIOS” emulator.) But now, Nintendo and Tropic Haze are asking a judge to specifically find that Yuzu circumvents its copyright protections by using those keys, even if it doesn’t come with them.

They are asking a federal judge to say yes to this, specifically:

Developing or distributing software, including Yuzu, that in its ordinary course functions only when cryptographic keys are integrated without authorization, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on trafficking in devices that circumvent effective technological measures, because the software is primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing technological measures.