A sad day for emulation and open source advocates, and a reminder that Nintendo can and will destroy you if they see fit.
Hopefully their works will live in the saved repos just as ReVanced was able to live on after YouTube shut the original project down.
It’s a sad day. Fuck Nintendo.
Yuzu gave them the opening to sue though. If they had been more circumspect - “Oh this is to develop homebrew / indie games nudge nudge” then maybe Nintendo wouldn’t have unleashed the lawyers or done so ineffectively. After all it wouldn’t be Yuzu’s fault if some wicked website corrupted their pure intentions by releasing device keys or patches that allowed their emulator run commercial games. But they were more blatant than that.
Also from an empathic perspective, of course Nintendo were going to sue. Yuzu should have known they would since that’s what console platforms do when something interferes with their profits. Yuzu is doubly bad since it interferes with hardware sales and game sales unlike custom firmware / cartridges which only affect game sales.
Of course the genie is already out of the bottle. Yuzu’s source code and binaries were on github for anyone to clone / fork. All the games are out in the wild. The piracy will carry on. I think it’s fair to say the NSP is effectively dead as a platform at this point. If a NSP2 turns up this year, as rumored, then I expect it will have revised anti-piracy measures and potentially a heavy online service aspect to go with it - it’s far easier to detect pirates and wield the banhammer when a device is online.
I don’t really get people saying fuck Nintendo. It’s their IP, and Yuzu team was pretty blatant it’s made for piracy, boasting how good it works with TotK. It’s not what you do when you try to stay under the radar. Regarding Switch 2, this exactly what happened with DS and 3DS. DS was so easy to pirate Nintendo went ultra ham on piracy protection measures in 3DS, which took a good while to break. I’d expect the same with Switch 2.Which will probably make things annoying for people who will buy the system
I don’t really get people saying fuck Nintendo. It’s their IP, and Yuzu team was pretty blatant it’s made for piracy
Because a significant percent of people have always seen IP as theft and IP lawsuits as shakedowns. Real Talk - IP was codified to solve one problem (it wasn’t casual piracy, it was inventors being ripped off by evil businesses), and it made that problem worse. We should’ve just thrown it out from there and tried something else, but then the evil businesses convinced the soccer moms that their little Billy listening to Metallica on Napster was everything wrong with this country.
It’s not what you do when you try to stay under the radar
And people walked down the street smoking pot in my state before it was legalized. We still said “FUCK the war on drugs” when they got harassed by cops.
If their shit wasn’t so expensive and their games were released on PC, nobody would pirate it. Nintendo is shooting themselves on the foot then crying foul.
Each dev kit is $450. Being able to test on an emulator is free. Sure, you ultimately want to test on hardware, but indie dev teams aren’t going to shell out that kind of money for each developer. Who gives a fuck about indie developers though, right?
True, but pretty sure you still need to license the Nintendo SDK to make a game that Nintendo will accept officially, so they’ll still get money off you.
You can use unofficial/open source SDKs for homebrew, though
Ah the SDK is free nvm
So someone forked the GitHub right?
Since there’s now legal precedent, and GitHub already has the signatures of the project code, they will simply now close down any fork that matches the code signatures to avoid getting sued by Nintendo as well.
Hopefully someone forked it to a completely different self-hosted GitHub-like instance or the other GitHub alternatives.
Court cases shouldn’t be allowed to be settled out of court after a certain point.
The repository removal was voluntary and done by the Yuzu team. GitHub doesn’t have to do anything and won’t do anything. Even when they receive a DMCA takedown, they only block forks made through GitHub’s “fork” button.
It would be possible to create a dummy “salt” commit and rebase every the branch onto it. The content would effectively be the same, but each commit hash would differ.
It would be better to “git clone” a repo under threat of removal than fork it in Github. That way an entire copy of its history is preserved. It’s possible the forks still exist for now, even if Yuzu removes their official repo, but if Nintendo serves Github the legal paperwork then the forks will get blasted.
That said if someone clones the repo, they probably ought to think twice before putting it back in the cloud without sanitizing / reconstructing the branches & history absent of the bits that got Yuzu into trouble in the first place.
Fuck off Nintendo.
something something Streisand effect
