Nintendo, widely considered one of the most litigious companies in the gaming world, recently had its bloodhound mode against Switch emulators pay off. The gaming company reportedly went after 401 repositories on GitHub, which included forks of Suyu and Yuzu emulators, among others.
To elaborate further, the 401 number doesn’t necessarily refer to separate Switch emulators. Rather, one emulator could fork out to hundreds of different or similar repositories. In the case of Suyu, Nintendo found over 300 repositories, posting the same cryptographic keys.
The following are the Switch emulators and the number of emulators that Nintendo took down.
- Suyu: 311 repositories
- Skyline: 29 repositories
- yuzu-EA4176: 21 forks
- MonoNX: 17 forks
- NicolasArvani/yuzu: 14 repositories
- yuzu-android: 8 repositories
- IpwnedU/yuzu-master: 1 repository
Nintendo argues that the Switch emulators circumvent its protection measures used by Switch games and more specifically, its cryptographic keys. This is the argument it uses to claim that said emulators violate the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA.
For those in the know and who have been following the debacle for some of the names on the list, the Yuzu emulator is no stranger to Nintendo’s wrath. The gaming company the Switch emulator’s creator, Tropic Haze, threw in the towel a couple of years ago and agreed to pay Nintendo a monetary settlement of US$2.4 million (~RM9.7 million).
Adding insult to injury, Tropic Haze then surrendered all its website domains and information related to the Switch emulator over to Nintendo, which included its source code. Finally, it agreed that it would not create any future software that would circumvent the gaming company’s technical protection.
As another example of Nintendo’s ruthlessness, the company had the console hacker Gary Bowser thrown into prison for 40 months in 2023. Bowser was let out early but rather than letting sleeping dogs lie, the company also obtained a court order, demanding he pay them US$14.5 million (~RM58.6 million) in damages. The kicker here is that, while they were in prison, Nintendo was already garnishing up to 30% of his income made in prison.
(Source: Lin Blog, Videocardz)
