Yuzu (Emulator)

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Part of a series on Nintendo Switch. [View Related Entries]

About

Yuzu was a Nintendo Switch emulator software developed by Tropic Haze. In February 2024, the developers of the emulator were sued by Nintendo over allegedly "facilitating piracy at a colossal scale." In March 2024, the lawsuit was settled out of court, with Tropic Haze taking down the emulator, all circumvention tools used in its development and its Nintendo 3Ds emulator Citra and agreeing to pay a settlement of $2.4 million to Nintendo.

History

On January 14th, 2018, 10 months after the release of the Nintendo Switch handheld console, the developers behind the Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra announced Yuzu, an emulator for Switch written in C++.^[1]^[2] Kotaku^[3] reported that Super Mario Odyssey was playable on Yuzu in November 2018 with minor glitches and slowdowns.

Yuzu was regularly updated since its initial release, adding multi-core CPU emulation,^[4] Fastmem support^[5] and other features. In May 2023, an Android version of the emulator was released.^[6]

Lawsuit and Shutdown

On February 27th, 2024, Nintendo filed a lawsuit against Tropic Haze LLC,^[7]^[8] the legal entity behind Team Yuzu, in US federal court, claiming that Yuzu illegally circumvents Nintendo's software encryption and "facilitates piracy at a colossal scale." The lawsuit mentioned The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom being leaked a week prior to its official release, with the leaked copies meant to be played in the Yuzu emulator, with Nintendo arguing that "defendant's development and distribution of Yuzu to the public materially contributes to and induces those third parties to infringe the copyrights in Nintendo's games."

The development of Yuzu ended on March 4th, 2024, after Tropic Haze and Nintendo of America settled the lawsuit out of court. Team Haze agreed to pay $2.4 million to Nintendo and admit that Yuzu is “primarily designed to circumvent and play Nintendo Switch games.” The company also agreed 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.^[9]

On March 4th, Team Yuzu shut down its website, Github and Patreon and deleted all posts from social media, posting^[10] a final message in which they spoke out against piracy (shown below).

Online Reactions

The March 2024 lawsuit and subsequent shutdown of Yuzu and Citra became a viral topic of discussion on social media as users discussed the legal status of emulation, argued about piracy and posted memes about Nintendo Lawsuits. For example, on March 4th, 2024, X^[11] user @BlooHook posted a Thing, Japan meme that received over 1,900 reposts and 17,000 likes in one day (shown below, left).

Later that day, X^[12] user @nonbatnary posted a meme about Shigeru Miyamoto personally forcing Team Yuzu to write their anti-piracy post, gaining over 1,300 reposts and 14,000 likes in one day (shown below, right).