Yuzu closes its emulator services, pays Nintendo for a hefty USD 2.4M!

Yuzu shuts its emulator services effective immediately on both PC and Android platforms.

Yuzu emulator logo on Android

Nintendo fights back!

Last week, Nintendo filed a legal action against the makers of Yuzu also known as the Tropical Haze. Nintendo says that the emulator maker has facilitated piracy "at a colossal scale".

If you are wondering how much damage the Japanese company has suffered, they claimed that 1 million+ copies of Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom were illegally obtained ahead of its official launch. Nintendo also added that many pirate websites have purposely said the game file was running on Yuzu.

Now both firms have reached a settlement and Yuzu will pay a large sum of USD 2.4M or around PHP 134.4M. However, this settlement is still pending for approval as per the court.

Skyrim running on the Yuzu mobile

With that move, Yuzu has also agreed they will be shutting down all of its operations effective immediately.

If you go to Google Play Store, GitHub, and Yuzu's official website, the developers have already deleted all of the files pertaining to the emulator. Apart from that Citra, a 3DS emulator is also included in the termination of services.

Meanwhile, Yuzu has also shared a statement on its Discord page saying:

Yuzu and Yuzu's support of Citra is being discontinued, effective immediately. Yuzu and its team have always been against piracy. We started the projects in good faith, out of a passion for Nintendo and its consoles and games, and did not intend to cause harm. But we see now that because our projects can circumvent Nintendo's technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy. In particular, we have been deeply disappointed when users have used our software to leak game content prior to its release and ruin the experience for legitimate purchasers and fans.

We have come to the decision that we cannot continue to allow this to occur, its statement continued. "Piracy was never our intention, and we believe that piracy of video games and video game consoles should end. Effective today, we will be pulling our code repositories offline, discontinuing our Patreon accounts and Discord servers, and, soon, shutting down our websites. We hope our actions will be a small step toward ending piracy of all creators' works. Thank you for your years of support and for understanding our decision, Yuzu added

What do you guys think?

Source: Yuzu