Nintendo files lawsuit against Tropic Haze (Switch emulator 'Yuzu' developers). UPDATE: 'Ryujinx' Switch emulator development also terminated

[cw_sasuke]

Kids Gloves are off, Nintendo has seen enough it seems like it and they are stepping in before it gets even worse.

Not too shocking.

 

[Danny]

I wonder what changed, what made them decide to quit now? I mean surely Nintendo have contacted them before threatening lawsuits against them with them not agreeing to Nintendo's terms, so why did they give up now?

Hard to overstate how much I hate this side of Nintendo.

Eh what? Lets say in an alternative timeline where the PS5 was hacked and emulated year 1, you really think Sony would sit idly by while their games where pirated like weeks before official release, and that continued to happen for like the whole lifespan of the PS5?

The only difference between Nintendo and their competitors is that Nintendo's console had a massive security flaw that was instantly exploited, causing their games to become mass pirated ever since, while their competitors have like no piracy problem with their current gen games, at all. So there is no mystery why they are more against this stuff than any of their competitors, Sony didn't have a few million free downloads of their Spiderman game to contend with for instance, like Nintendo had with Tears of the kingdom.

 

[brutaka3]

I wonder what changed, what made them decide to quit now? I mean surely Nintendo have contacted them before threatening lawsuits against them with them not agreeing to Nintendo's terms, so why did they give up now?

I really doubt they contacted them before this. Nintendo just did this now probably because (like already mentioned) a selling point of the successor is better running Switch games and emulators are already doing that.

 

[Gimmick]

I don't see the reasoning for the hate Nintendo is getting for the emulator enforcement. People are pretending that emulation doesn't go hand in hand with pirating. Nintendo has no issue with people emulating their old games, the problem is that the same people turn around and do the same to the new games.

People also underrate how bad this pirating scene is for a lot of smaller games where an extra 5k sales matter. These emulators are hurting a lot of smaller devs.

Emulating is fine, it's great even, but not when it gives a platform for downloading new games. This line has been blurred for too long and yuzu and ryujinx both ignored this problem because it gave them a lot of users.

 

[Danny]

It seems that something shifted after the whole mass piracy of TOTK happened, it seems that it yielded emulation its moral superiority completely, now every emulator just yields to Nintendo after TOTK happened, while before they always stood their ground. Maybe TOTK piracy made it harder to legally defend emulation due to making it so easily provable by Nintendo in court what the true purpose of these Switch emulators were?

 

[Vena]

Tbh, this is a bizarre way for this to end.

Sounds like they basically paid him off or made some other offer to have him stop his development. But it doesn't do much to the project as a whole unlike with Yuzu.

Of course as with many such projects, they live and die by the one dedicated dev at the core of it all.

 

[Renmazuo]

I wonder what changed, what made them decide to quit now? I mean surely Nintendo have contacted them before threatening lawsuits against them with them not agreeing to Nintendo's terms, so why did they give up now?

My personal bet is that they hired him.

 

[tentacle-tropes]

I don't see the reasoning for the hate Nintendo is getting for the emulator enforcement. People are pretending that emulation doesn't go hand in hand with pirating. Nintendo has no issue with people emulating their old games, the problem is that the same people turn around and do the same to the new games.

People also underrate how bad this pirating scene is for a lot of smaller games where an extra 5k sales matter. These emulators are hurting a lot of smaller devs.

Emulating is fine, it's great even, but not when it gives a platform for downloading new games. This line has been blurred for too long and yuzu and ryujinx both ignored this problem because it gave them a lot of users.

The hate comes from enthusiasts yelling loudly while also Nintendo pressing the right buttons for these types of communities.

 

[Aime]

Pirate is pirate many people like free and used fancy words for this.

Even rich company did not want to paid.

 

[Person]

I don't see the reasoning for the hate Nintendo is getting for the emulator enforcement. People are pretending that emulation doesn't go hand in hand with pirating. Nintendo has no issue with people emulating their old games, the problem is that the same people turn around and do the same to the new games.

People also underrate how bad this pirating scene is for a lot of smaller games where an extra 5k sales matter. These emulators are hurting a lot of smaller devs.

Emulating is fine, it's great even, but not when it gives a platform for downloading new games. This line has been blurred for too long and yuzu and ryujinx both ignored this problem because it gave them a lot of users.

Why would emulators matter particularly to small devs? They almost uniformly release to PC in native format. Nintendo can do what it wants, but I don't agree with framing this around small devs.

 

[Donkusei]

They're just doing what they have to to protect their business. We all know the main usage of these emulators.

 

[Necu]

Sales figures have now become a more important criterion for evaluating games than ratings. Poor game sales can become a negation of the game itself.

Providing (Nintendo) a free viable version on the Internet is not only disrespect for their paying users, but also a negation of the work of their developers.

 

[SinCityAssassin]

Like I said when yuzu got shut down, I would have a lot less animosity towards these sort of people who rally against Nintendo doing these things if they weren't so two-faced with their intention. Most of them are absolutely not in it from a "moral" standpoint or an accessibility standpoint. They just want free games and they want an easy target to make themselves feel better about wanting free games while cloaking themselves in a moral highground of "archival matters" and "community efforts matter".

Be honest with yourself, you just want to play free games on a computer. I would respect you more if you actually admitted that.

 

[Gimmick]

Why would emulators matter particularly to small devs? They almost uniformly release to PC in native format. Nintendo can do what it wants, but I don't agree with framing this around small devs.

I am not trying to frame it around small devs, but the growth of emulators has implications for them because it also grows the pirate scene, since these emulators aren't combating piracy.

 

[Bodokoh]

Game preservation is probably the most bs thing I've ever heard for justifying emulation of current gen games.

 

[BTB123]

Like I said when yuzu got shut down, I would have a lot less animosity towards these sort of people who rally against Nintendo doing these things if they weren't so two-faced with their intention. Most of them are absolutely not in it from a "moral" standpoint or an accessibility standpoint. They just want free games and they want an easy target to make themselves feel better about wanting free games while cloaking themselves in a moral highground of "archival matters" and "community efforts matter".

Be honest with yourself, you just want to play free games on a computer. I would respect you more if you actually admitted that.

They believe they have the moral high ground because "it's morally correct to pirate Nintendo games". If they just say it enough times it becomes true. Just like any lie you can tell yourself.

 

[balgajo]

My moral instance is the same as always. It's fine to create a hardware that play your games, you don't have the obligation to port to other platforms. But if people create an emulator or even a hardware that play your game you shouldn't have power to restrict it.
If you're a CD player company and record label at the same time you shouldn't have power to sue people because they managed to get your CDs running on their CD players. If your business model depends on this it shouldn't exist in first place.
Anyways, just another example for how powerful companies are.

My propose would be the opposite DMCA circumventing access-control measure. If a company is artificially creating ways of preventing you access to your copy (in a way you can't execute it in other places), the company should be the one to be sued. No only for games but ebooks, movies, music... But first we need some decent regulatory agency, like in UE, to discuss more basic stuff like digital ownership.

 

[tentacle-tropes]

My moral instance is the same as always. It's fine to create a hardware that play your games, you don't have the obligation to port to other platforms. But if people creates an emulator or even a hardware that play your game you shouldn't have power to restrict it.
If you're a CD player company and record label at the same time you shouldn't have power to sue people because they managed to get your CDs running on their CD players. If your business model depends on this it shouldn't exist in first place.
Anyways, just another example for how powerful companies are.

That just sounds like a disaster waiting to happen as we’ve seen with Yuzu.

 

[KtSlime]

Yuzu and Ryujinx aren't just Switch hardware emulators though, they decode using Nintendo's keys to play the games and that's the problem. If they just emulated the hardware without doing that there would almost certainly be no problem, of course they wouldn't run any officially released Switch software since they don't have the keys and that would make the projects much less interesting to the people not developing the emulators.

 

[Danny]

My moral instance is the same as always. It's fine to create a hardware that play your games, you don't have the obligation to port to other platforms. But if people create an emulator or even a hardware that play your game you shouldn't have power to restrict it.
If you're a CD player company and record label at the same time you shouldn't have power to sue people because they managed to get your CDs running on their CD players. If your business model depends on this it shouldn't exist in first place.
Anyways, just another example for how powerful companies are.

My propose would be the opposite DMCA circumventing access-control measure. If a company is artificially creating ways of preventing you access to your copy (in a way you can't execute it in other places), the company should be the one to be sued. No only for games but ebooks, movies, music... But first we need some decent regulatory agency, like in UE, to discuss more basic stuff like digital ownership.

I don't see how Switch emulation can be seen as moral, given that millions of people play Switch games for free sometimes weeks before official release. The fact is that after the mass piracy of TOTK before official release was revealed, the companies behind the big Switch emulators has yielded more to Nintendo afterwards, which just shows how the legal and moral arguments swayed more towards Nintendo's side, before that stuff was revealed Yuzu and Ryujinx was at the hight of their power.

Rage towards Nintendo doesn't change the fact that no big video game company would simply sit idly by if millions of free downloads happened for their big budget game releases, before those games were even officially released to consumers. You think Sony would sit by and clap if Spiderman got downloaded by a few million people like 2 weeks before launch?

Nintendo didn't pump in like 200 million budget into Zelda games to have people download those games for free, if emulation was more popular and normalized, it would jeopardize games with such budgets from ever being made in the first place.

 

[Aostia82]

My moral instance is the same as always. It's fine to create a hardware that play your games, you don't have the obligation to port to other platforms. But if people create an emulator or even a hardware that play your game you shouldn't have power to restrict it.
If you're a CD player company and record label at the same time you shouldn't have power to sue people because they managed to get your CDs running on their CD players. If your business model depends on this it shouldn't exist in first place.
Anyways, just another example for how powerful companies are.

My propose would be the opposite DMCA circumventing access-control measure. If a company is artificially creating ways of preventing you access to your copy (in a way you can't execute it in other places), the company should be the one to be sued. No only for games but ebooks, movies, music... But first we need some decent regulatory agency, like in UE, to discuss more basic stuff like digital ownership.

This would basically undermine the very eseence of hardware companies, that develop their games are propellers for their business

 

[balgajo]

I don't see how Switch emulation can be seen as moral, given that millions of people play Switch games for free sometimes weeks before official release. The fact is that after the mass piracy of TOTK before official release was revealed, the companies behind the big Switch emulators has yielded more to Nintendo afterwards, which just shows how the legal and moral arguments swayed more towards Nintendo's side, before that stuff was revealed Yuzu and Ryujinx was at the hight of their power.

You can be against piracy and still advocate for basic consumers right, for example, a interchangeable media format. You should fight piracy going after pirates and not advocating for consumer rights restriction. I'm not even mad at Nintendo for wanting law to be enforced (it's the right thing for a company to do) my problem is more about the poor regulations that doesn't favor consumers.

This would basically undermine the very eseence of hardware companies, that develop their games are propellers for their business

If your business model depends on such restriction of consumers right I believe it shouldn't exist in first place. You should sell your hardware because it has a nice cost, innovations that aren't possible in other platforms. And not because you're artificially locking away people from your games. The analogy I have in mind is Apple artificially creating charging formats that aren't compatible with others and didn't offered benefits for being different and how UE ruled against it.

 

[Necu]

You cannot support the law while opposing it at the same time, it is difficult to convince others.

 

[Vena]

You can be against piracy and still advocate for basic consumers right, for example, a interchangeable media format. You should fight piracy going after pirates and not advocating for consumer rights restriction. I'm not even mad at Nintendo for wanting law to be enforced (it's the right thing for a company to do) my problem is more about the poor regulations that doesn't favor consumers.


If your business model depends on such restriction of consumers right I believe it shouldn't exist in first place. You should sell your hardware because it has a nice cost, innovations that aren't possible in other platforms. And not because you're artificially locking away people from your games. The analogy I have in mind is Apple artificially creating charging formats that aren't compatible with others and didn't offered benefits for being different and how UE ruled against it.

Many businesses depend on hardware sales and secrets therein on which custom software is then run. This take is very naive and only looking at things within the gaming sphere but it applies as much as it does to a 300$ Switch as it does to a 3,000,000$ PAM4 BERT tester.

If you tear apart a Keysight instrument and reproduce their secrets for other hardware via what in many ways borders on theft and spread of corporate trade secrets, they'd come after you with a hammer as well. Heck, the US government would probably be knocking on your door at that point.

 

[balgajo]

You cannot support the law while opposing it at the same time, it is difficult to convince others.

Isn't that what lawmakers do when they propose law changes? They respect current law but propose changes to it because they believe there's something immoral.

Many businesses depend on hardware sales and secrets therein on which custom software is then run. This take is very naive and only looking at things within the gaming sphere but it applies as much as it does to a 300$ Switch as it does to a 3,000,000$ PAM4 BERT tester.

If you tear apart a Keysight instrument and reproduce their secrets for other hardware via what in many ways borders on theft and spread of corporate trade secrets, they'd come after you with a hammer as well. Heck, the US government would probably be knocking on your door at that point.

For that we have patents. If you're able to recreate the hardware without patents violation or at least licensing them you should be free to do so.

 

[master94ga]

My moral instance is the same as always. It's fine to create a hardware that play your games, you don't have the obligation to port to other platforms. But if people create an emulator or even a hardware that play your game you shouldn't have power to restrict it.
If you're a CD player company and record label at the same time you shouldn't have power to sue people because they managed to get your CDs running on their CD players. If your business model depends on this it shouldn't exist in first place.
Anyways, just another example for how powerful companies are.

My propose would be the opposite DMCA circumventing access-control measure. If a company is artificially creating ways of preventing you access to your copy (in a way you can't execute it in other places), the company should be the one to be sued. No only for games but ebooks, movies, music... But first we need some decent regulatory agency, like in UE, to discuss more basic stuff like digital ownership.

This would be a dream but most of the software company that create also hardware made their success with artificial/custom formats and many other anti consumer practice that lock you into their ecosystem. The problem is that most of the time regulations works is to defend company, not consumers.

What I see with the emulators discussion is that in one side of the discussion we have people personally attached to Nintendo and their hardware and are mad that other people are playing the same games in a better way in another hardware, crazy to be against but is what it is. The other side is mostly just people that would have never bought that hardware and just want to play Nintendo Games, most of them using piracy but some of them with legal software.

However my point is if I buy a software I should be able to run that software in any hardware that can run it and nobody should prevent that. Going against emulator is 100% an anticonsumer practice, but like every company Nintendo does what they think is the best for them and their business.

 

[Danny]

You can be against piracy and still advocate for basic consumers right, for example, a interchangeable media format. You should fight piracy going after pirates and not advocating for consumer rights restriction. I'm not even mad at Nintendo for wanting law to be enforced (it's the right thing for a company to do) my problem is more about the poor regulations that doesn't favor consumers.


If your business model depends on such restriction of consumers right I believe it shouldn't exist in first place. You should sell your hardware because it has a nice cost, innovations that aren't possible in other platforms. And not because you're artificially locking away people from your games. The analogy I have in mind is Apple artificially creating charging formats that aren't compatible with others and didn't offered benefits for being different and how UE ruled against it.

I don't see what anti-consumer practices there are here. Nintendo makes products, they as a company create hardware and then software for that hardware, and that is their way to offer consumers their products. There is no element of force here, people are freely able to decide if they want the product Nintendo offers and thus buy their hardware and software, or they have the ability to choose tons of other hardware and software from other companies instead if they don't want to buy what Nintendo is offering them. If people think Nintendo hardware is too weak, they have the option to buy a PS5 or an Xbox series S/X or a gaming PC and play games from other companies instead.

 

[Necu]

Isn't that what lawmakers do when they propose law changes? They respect current law but propose changes to it because they believe there's something immoral.


For that we have patents. If you're able to recreate the hardware without patents violation or at least licensing them you should be free to do so.

This is only a moral choice of some people, not including those who make games and legitimate game players.

I am not saying that the law is necessarily right, this is just a fallacy rebuttal. Considering that many people used the law as the shield of the simulator before, I feel no problem to see Nintendo fight in the legal field where the simulator is in an advantage.

 

[master94ga]

This is only a moral choice of some people, not including those who make games and legitimate game players.

What makes not legitimate players using an emulator if they are buying the games?

 

[Danny]

What makes not legitimate players using an emulator if they are buying the games?

Such arguments is always funny, because they always focus on the miniscule legitimate emulator users, when will you realize how people using emulators to play games they don't own for free totally dominates emulation usage? Particularly when it comes to emulators focusing on active platforms such as Switch.

 

[Vena]

For that we have patents. If you're able to recreate the hardware without patents violation or at least licensing them you should be free to do so.

But these things, at least using the Switch example, cannot be done without using company secrets to operate. They aren't decompiling the software in some unique way; they have to use a company secret to do so. Whether you do this to Nintendo, or you steal the keys to software from Keysight, the end result is the same.

You're not going to rebuild a Keysight BERT without a lot of internal knowledge as well which runs into issues of how authentic the reverse engineer can even be deemed if you needed corporate secrets to do it in the first place. Obviously this is an extreme example as this is hardware that costs millions to manufacture with cutting edge signal precision at 100+ GHz nowadays of RF signal fidelity, but it is at the base still a company that manufacturers hardware and on that hardware also sells software as a core part of its business.

 

[Necu]

What makes not legitimate players using an emulator if they are buying the games?

Even for those who only purchase games and use emulators to play, the process itself is complex.
Some of them, for the purpose of gaining attention, spread spoilers extensively in advance. Some people make money by offering games through this channel (regardless of whether they purchase games or not). Some people are still playing normally.
I am not sure about the proportion of these people, but some of them have caused far more negative impacts than others. Many Switch users choose to close their social networks in advance to stay away from leaked content.

Anyway, simulators are harming the interests of players who purchase games and play them normally. In the past, when one side used the law as a defense for the simulator, they naturally had to bear the consequences, and one of the two sides could not move their goalpost infinitely.

Of course, people can still criticize based on their own interests, but one party can no longer use the law to refuse other voices again, which actually has no impact on the event itself.

 

[Belthazar]

Honestly, what is hard from a legal point of view is understanding how an emulator for an actual active console still sold on the market should be defended

Even if we pretend it was used "just" to play legally owned games at higher resolutions/better performance we need to understand those could / wouls totally be USP for the launch of a direct successor going into a next generation hardware launch

Let's wait until games will need to be saved from being lost entering the retro status before backing something like that, from a commercial (even consumer) point of view imho

The lawsuit used as a precedent for emulation being legal (Sony vs VGS over PS1 emulation) happened in 1999, a year before the PS2 was releases and when the PS1 was still pretty much active.

So no, it's really not hard to understand from a legal perspective. This is just Nintendo bullying a smaller party that would go bankrupt if they decided to fight, even though they would've most likely win.

 

[balgajo]

But these things, at least using the Switch example, cannot be done without using company secrets to operate. They aren't decompiling the software in some unique way; they have to use a company secret to do so. Whether you do this to Nintendo, or you steal the keys to software from Keysight, the end result is the same.

I don't get it, which secrets are they using to develop Switch emulator? From what I could understand about Yuzu one the problems was that they were developing the emulator by reverse engineering of a internal software, considering TOTK wasn't even released by that time. And that's a good argument.

You're not going to rebuild a Keysight BERT without a lot of internal knowledge as well which runs into issues of how authentic the reverse engineer can even be deemed if you needed corporate secrets to do it in the first place. Obviously this is an extreme example as this is hardware that costs millions to manufacture with cutting edge signal precision at 100+ GHz nowadays of RF signal fidelity, but it is at the base still a company that manufacturers hardware and on that hardware also sells software as a core part of its business.

If you're developing a hardware that people can't do the same without violating your patents it is what it is I guess. As long as you aren't doing like Apple and creating technology just to prevent competition.

 

[Vena]

I don't get it, which secrets are they using to develop Switch emulator? From what I could understand about Yuzu one the problems was that they were developing the emulator by reverse engineering of a internal software, considering TOTK wasn't even released by that time. And that's a good argument.


If you're developing a hardware that people can't do the same without violating your patents it is what it is I guess. As long as you aren't doing like Apple and creating technology just to prevent competition.

They need the keys to bypass encryption to decode the games in order to work on the emulator's ability to support said games in a playable state. They haven't made full interoperability, they are approximating and using games themselves to tune said approximation.

Without the games and having broken encryption to study the workings of nvservices directly, it'd have taken them decades to have proper emulation built from scratch.

 

[master94ga]

Some of them, for the purpose of gaining attention, spread spoilers extensively in advance. Some people make money by offering games through this channel (regardless of whether they purchase games or not). Some people are still playing normally.
I am not sure about the proportion of these people, but some of them have caused far more negative impacts than others. Many Switch users choose to close their social networks in advance to stay away from leaked content.

This has nothing to do with emulators, because the problem is that retailers give copies of the game in advance to some players, the same player that has access to a game in advance can play and do the leak both via official hardware or the emulator.

Infact we have leak about any kind of game, also plastation exclusive that can't be emulated.

 

[Danny]

Emulation today should not be legally possible, breaking encryption security is illegal under the DMCA, Nintendo could easily win that in court and kill emulation of all consoles that have protection measures installed in them. The old emulation case Playstation lost couldn't happen today, because Switch emulators knowingly break Nintendo's encryption security, totally illegal under the DMCA.

I think its only a matter of time that modern emulation is in court, and loses, probably something Nintendo will do during the Switch 2 era to not have the Switch mass piracy situation happening again.

 

[WildCard]

The lawsuit used as a precedent for emulation being legal (Sony vs VGS over PS1 emulation) happened in 1999, a year before the PS2 was releases and when the PS1 was still pretty much active.

So no, it's really not hard to understand from a legal perspective. This is just Nintendo bullying a smaller party that would go bankrupt if they decided to fight, even though they would've most likely win.

The Bleem case is very ancient in terms of technology and its awareness (as you pointed out, it was in 1999) and that the legality of emulation hangs on very specific technicalities that I doubt most everyone bother to go through out of convenience.

And you can thank that Yuzu never decided to go into court but yielded instead, because it would have destroyed the whole precedent of "emulation being legal" as with their spyware, they could see exactly how many people were actually pirating games and playing them prior to their official releases. The Switch emulation scene was poking the bear the whole time, it's a miracle it got nothing more than a slap in the wrist and a bribe.

 

[Danny]

The Bleem case is very ancient in terms of technology and its awareness (as you pointed out, it was in 1999) and that the legality of emulation hangs on very specific technicalities that I doubt most everyone bother to go through out of convenience.

And you can thank that Yuzu never decided to go into court but yielded instead, because it would have destroyed the whole precedent of "emulation being legal" as with their spyware, they could see exactly how many people were actually pirating games and playing them prior to their official releases.

Exactly, modern emulation is based on circumventing encryption security keys, which is illegal under the DMCA, emulation could never win a legal case today as it did during the 90s for that reason alone.

 

[Necu]

This has nothing to do to emulators, because the problem is that retailers give copies of the game in advance to some players, the same player that has access to a game in advance can play and do the leak both via official hardware the emulator.

Infact we have leak about any kind of game, also plastation exclusive that can't be emulated.

No, emulators allow more people to have early exposure to games and amplify this impact. In the past, only a very small number (up to dozens) of people played in advance, and the dissemination of this information was highly controllable. Now there are 1M people who can get in touch with and talk about these things a week in advance, which is unavoidable. These two types of leaks are completely different.

IMO, this is actually the bankrupt of the notion that companies can offer free way for their games to attract new players. CDPR and Sony do not encrypt their games, allowing their games to be obtained for free. See what they ultimately gained? Anyway, they didn't get what they wanted.
Nintendo certainly wouldn't be willing to provide some free games accesses anymore, which doesn't necessarily have to be emulators, but it's not a good idea to give your game to others for free now.

 

[cw_sasuke]

Pretty sure there is pressure from 3rdParty Partners as well for Nintendo to get this shit sorted out. We already know that some of them feel some type of way about the fact that Switch 2 is gonna have BC and this might make it more difficult for them to sell new software. Now you add a platform where Piracy and Emulation becomes more and more mainstream/accepted with every year and there is a fear of thing repeating itself.

Switch still gets a lot of 3rdParty games from smaller devs, once you get so used to not paying for stuff many people just stick to it if its possible - the person not willing to pay for a TotK level game and feeling good about themselves, is unlikely to just stop at this game but is gonna milk that "preservation" and emulation cow until its dry.

Certain gamers entitlement will push many of them towards piracy when they feel like it. "Oh Unicorn Overlord isnt releasing on PC ? Guess ill just pirate the Switch release."

Honestly im surprised that Nintendo let shit slide for so long. So yeah i absolutely believe that with the every increasing 3rdParty support, they cant justify having the perception of being the easy theft eco system - not when the Switch family might be their main platforms for at least another decade.

 

[Danny]

Pretty sure there is pressure from 3rdParty Partners as well for Nintendo to get this shit sorted out. We already know that some of them feel some type of way about the fact that Switch 2 is gonna have BC and this might make it more difficult for them to sell new software. Now you add a platform where Piracy and Emulation becomes more and more mainstream/accepted with every year and there is a fear of thing repeating itself.

Switch still gets a lot of 3rdParty games from smaller devs, once you get so used to not paying for stuff many people just stick to it if its possible - the person not willing to pay for a TotK level game and feeling good about themselves, is unlikely to just stop at this game but is gonna milk that "preservation" and emulation cow until its dry.

Certain gamers entitlement will push many of them towards piracy when they feel like it. "Oh Unicorn Overlord isnt releasing on PC ? Guess ill just pirate the Switch release."

Honestly im surprised that Nintendo let shit slide for so long. So yeah i absolutely believe that with the every increasing 3rdParty support, they cant justify having the perception of being the easy theft eco system - not when the Switch family might be their main platforms for at least another decade.

Exactly, all the arguments are aimed against Nintendo. But does anyone think Capcom is happy that MH Rise has been pirated countless times on Switch? Or Square Enix with their games? Its disastrous for Nintendo building relations with third parties to have a problem with mass piracy like the Switch had, it makes third parties more reluctant to put their games on Nintendo hardware. I'd bet many big publishers, both western and Japanese have put pressure on Nintendo to go hard on piracy on their consoles in anticipation of Switch 2 as well. When these publishers put AAA games on a platform, they certainly don't want to deal with games being available weeks before release for free due to mass piracy.

 

[balgajo]

They need the keys to bypass encryption to decode the games in order to work on the emulator's ability to support said games in a playable state. They haven't made full interoperability, they are approximating and using games themselves to tune said approximation.

Without the games and having broken encryption to study the workings of nvservices directly, it'd have taken them decades to have proper emulation built from scratch.

Oh I see, I'm aware of this. I thought they discovered Yuzu or Ryujinx people were working with leaked information(though Yuzu were, arguably). From the legal point of view I wonder if developing an emulator based on reverse engineering of software with broken DRM makes the emulator itself illegal. Last time I read here in Brazil the law is more about the work protection itself and the DRM has some gray area. For example, breaking Kindle DRM to read an ebook on Kobo. I'd say they'd have more difficult on ruling Ryujinx illegal here. Maybe that's why they probably moneyhatted the dev.

 

[Vena]

Oh I see, I'm aware of this. I thought they discovered Yuzu or Ryujinx people were working with leaked information(though Yuzu were, arguably). From the legal point of view I wonder if developing an emulator based on reverse engineering of software with broken DRM makes the emulator itself illegal. Last time I read here in Brazil the law is more about the work protection itself and the DRM has some gray area. For example, breaking Kindle DRM to read an ebook on Kobo. I'd say they'd have more difficult on ruling Ryujinx illegal here. Maybe that's why they probably moneyhatted the dev.

It's not well defined on legality. In modern tech, I'd say that my expectation of a new case would err on illegality. DRM is far too important to far too many businesses in the world and they wouldn't want it weekend both for competitive and general security reasons.

The old Bleem stuff is so outdated as to be meaningless nowadays.

 

[MegaXZero]

Important to remember that in the US, exemptions to DMCA for drm are handled by the library of congress. Multiple times when exemptions have come up for ruling, such as jailbreaking devices, the library has made exceptions to those exemptions for video game consoles, deeming piracy too much a threat.

 

[Danny]

It's not well defined on legality. In modern tech, I'd say that my expectation of a new case would err on illegality. DRM is far too important to far too many businesses in the world and they wouldn't want it weekend both for competitive and general security reasons.

The old Bleem stuff is so outdated as to be meaningless nowadays.

I agree that i don't see how modern emulation would win in court against say Nintendo, at least under US law. I wonder why Nintendo haven't taken this whole issue to court and outlawed emulation through precedent. Because i don't see how emulators can win the legal argument when it comes to illegally circumventing encryption security of modern consoles. Nintendo seems have the means to end emulation of every future Nintendo console in their hands from what i can see from what the DMCA states.

 

[SquidEnthusiast]

Isn't that what lawmakers do when they propose law changes? They respect current law but propose changes to it because they believe there's something immoral.


For that we have patents. If you're able to recreate the hardware without patents violation or at least licensing them you should be free to do so.

I would take exceptjon to the idea that lawmakers make laws from a stance of morality in most cases. Most politicians are corrupt and seeking to enrich themselves and their corporate donor class interests.

 

[tentacle-tropes]

The lawsuit used as a precedent for emulation being legal (Sony vs VGS over PS1 emulation) happened in 1999, a year before the PS2 was releases and when the PS1 was still pretty much active.

So no, it's really not hard to understand from a legal perspective. This is just Nintendo bullying a smaller party that would go bankrupt if they decided to fight, even though they would've most likely win.

From a legal perspective it is very murky


If I were an emulator dev I would try to stay as far away from a court as I can since “most likely” isn’t really a guarantee that I would screw everyone over.

 

[Danny]

From a legal perspective it is very murky


If I were an emulator dev I would try to stay as far away from a court as I can since “most likely” isn’t really a guarantee that I would screw everyone over.

I think Nintendo is getting very close to challenge the legality of modern emulation in court, it will probably depend on what happens regarding Switch 2 hacking, emulation and piracy in the coming years. That could force them to challenge emulation on the legality of bypassing encryption security to emulate consoles.

 

[tentacle-tropes]

I think Nintendo is getting very close to challenge the legality of modern emulation in court, it will probably depend on what happens regarding Switch 2 hacking, emulation and piracy in the coming years. That could force them to challenge emulation on the legality of bypassing encryption security to emulate consoles.

It depends because like emulator devs they actually don’t wanna screw it over for themselves either if the ruling is outside their favor. So the current holding pattern is the best. Though they are ready in case such a time comes.