Yuzu, Emulation, and Good Ol’ Fashioned Legal Trouble

by Max Contreras

Just a couple weeks ago, the team of developers that created the emulators Yuzu, a Nintendo Switch emulator, and Citra, a Nintendo 3DS emulator, got wiped off the planet by the big suits at Nintendo over claims of copyright infringement. Nintendo claimed the developers of Yuzu were facilitating piracy at a colossal scale.” and sued for 2.4 million dollars (Castro). Well, the Yuzu developers folded immediately. They didn’t stand a chance; they relinquished their domain to Nintendo, ceased all operations, and now they have to pay that 2.4 million dollars. As someone who believes in civil disobedience, I immediately want to point the finger at Nintendo and call them the cutthroat capitalist spawn of the modern world’s degrading condition who force the poor proletariat to purchase their console so they may play their games developed exclusively for that same console. But it’s not that simple, at least in Yuzu’s case. Emulation itself is a complicated topic; it’s kind of like an ethical and legal minefield. One wrong step, and now monetary arms and legs are being blown into small, dissipating chunks.

Yeah, I'm not reading all that.

To understand why the Yuzu team folded so quickly, we can look at how emulation on Yuzu worked. In order for Yuzu to function properly, users were required to provide the files of their own system's BIOS, which is essentially the operating system of a console. After the BIOS was provided, users would then have to provide the valid files of the game they wished to play. Users of Yuzu could provide the BIOS from their own Switch system and valid game files from their own legal cartridges. The only issue was that this was a somewhat technical process, and for most, it was more trouble than it was worth. Given the scope of file sharing on the internet, it wasn’t hard to just find these files through a simple search. With all the necessary files propagating on the internet, one didn’t even need a Switch to play Switch games.

Most emulators actually work in a similar manner; one must find the BIOS, then find the game they want to play, so why was Yuzu in particular hounded and mauled by Nintendo? After all, there are plenty of other developer teams that have developed emulators designed to emulate their older consoles, such as the Wii and Gamecube. It’s likely that the cause can be attributed to the fact that the Yuzu team wanted to make money off of their emulator. Even further, their emulator was not open-source.

The Importance of Being Open-Source

For an emulator to survive, it needs to be open-source. Open-source emulators are emulators that display all their coding. Anyone can look at the code and verify its integrity, and if the software developers permit, anyone can use and share the code. In emulation circles, code exchange is commonplace and vital to an emulator’s success (Fenlon). If code is open-source, nothing can be hidden.

Furthermore, open-source emulators are almost never targeted by corporations because their open-source nature actively prevents them from using the proprietary code of the console that is being emulated. An open-source emulator is required to reverse engineer everything within a system’s code in order for it to be deemed legal. This is exemplified in Connectix v. Sony, a lawsuit in which Sony attempted to claim copyright infringement over Connectix’s “Virtual Game Station.” The 9th District Court of Appeals deemed Connectix’s use of Sony’s Playstation 1 bios was legal due to it being reverse engineered to fit their emulator. The use of the BIOS was modified and therefore fell under fair use.

This is why there is always some contention with closed-source development. The only product the public sees is the end product. With closed-source development, developers can inject whatever code they wish into their project, and unless their code gets leaked or subpoenaed by a court, it’s completely private. If a closed-source developer wanted to take shortcuts and speed up the development of their emulator, it’s possible to steal the code of the original proprietary software or take code without permission from open-source developers. Yuzu was developed at an exponentially faster pace than any emulator we had seen before, and this is even more impressive because the switch is an eighth-generation console. When we compare the total development of Yuzu compared to other eighth-generation consoles, Yuzu was like a jaded middle-aged office worker, and the other eighth-generation console emulators were still being developed in the womb. The gap was absolutely massive.

Unfortunately (and fortunately for Nintendo), this development gap was likely the result of stolen code. The Yuzu team themselves have also been known to steal code in the past. No one’s going to weep for Nintendo’s minisculely inconvenienced prophet margin, but theft is theft, and the courts would certainly declare it as such. Yuzu itself had a paid premium version the Yuzu team was offering, which further stacked the odds against them. With a non-open-source, paid version of their emulator going around, it’s no wonder they folded within a week.

Even further, we can look at Nintendo's claims that Yuzu facilitated piracy. Again, no one but Nintendo is mourning the loss of their profits, and I’m generally unsympathetic, but Nintendo’s claims are true. Piracy is incredibly easy, and through piracy, one can play whatever game they wish; all one has to do is sit through the atrocious download speeds, and if they’re unlucky, they might get some malware. As much as I would like to believe that Yuzu’s ability to emulate any switch game was not abused, it undoubtedly was. The only question that must be asked is: How much money was lost from piracy? This number is likely unknowable and unprovable, so we can look at Nintendo’s actions as not a way to recoup their losses but as a wayas a way to send a message.

They uhhhh. . . seem to be doing pretty fine to me.

What Does This Mean for You, or Anyone Interested in Emulation?

Nintendo’s actions don’t mean much for the average individual (other than the corporate stranglehold growing ever tighter). The message wasn’t meant for the consumer but rather for the enterprising developer who wants to make some cash off of developing an emulator. Lawsuits cannot set legal precedent, but what they can do is send a message, and the message has seemed to work, at least for some developers. The paid and closed-source Nintendo DS emulator Drastic was quickly made free by its developers as soon as Yuzu made the decision to concede (Hollister). All other popular console emulators are both free and open-source, so it’s likely that nothing will happen to them. If a lawsuit were to be pressed against one of the development teams, then it’d likely turn into a wild goose chase for the corporation.

However, if you, the consumer, want to boot up an old SNES game found on an innocuous and slightly shady website in an emulator, then no one can or will stop you. It’s completely safe to do so, and it's even encouraged by some as a means of preservation. In the age of shoddy game releases and microtransactions, I really wouldn’t blame someone if they wanted to go play some old releases. I really recommend Final Fantasy 6.

Works Cited

Hollister, Sean. “Nintendo Switch Emulator Yuzu Will Utterly Fold and Pay $2.4M to Settle Its Lawsuit.” The Verge, 4 Mar. 2024, www.theverge.com/2024/3/4/24090357/nintendo-yuzu-emulator-lawsuit-settlement.

Hollister, Sean.. “The Nintendo DS Emulator Drastic Is Now Free as Yuzu Lawsuit Fallout Begins.” The Verge, 5 Mar. 2024, www.theverge.com/2024/3/5/24091561/nintendo-lawsuit-fallout-yuzu. Accessed 23 Mar. 2024.

published,

Wes Fenlon. “The Ethics of Emulation: How Creators, the Community, and the Law View Console Emulators.” PC Gamer, 28 Mar. 2017, www.pcgamer.com/the-ethics-of-emulation-how-creators-the-community-and-the-law-view-console-emulators/.

“U.S. Copyright Office.” Copyright.gov, 2019, www.copyright.gov/fair-use/summaries/sony-connectix-9thcir2000.pdf.