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News Nintendo is suing the creators of popular Switch emulator Yuzu. They claim TOTK was pirated over 1 million times before release

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SunnyDays said:
Currently Yuzu makes 30k in support per month through support. They'll need an injunction against Yuzu or else Yuzu will have a healthy defence fund. Heck, even if there was such an injunction, I imagine a GoFundMe for the defence would be quite successful, as this entire case will set precedent for the emulation community at large.
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Yep, that suing will settle a precedent in the community, one way or another.
 
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dingbat said:
That's a fair line to draw, but in the legal documents of this very case Nintendo argues that because they make old games available through paid services like NSO, all non-Nintendo sanctioned emulation -- including that of classic game systems that aren't for sale -- harms them. This case isn't just gonna affect Yuzu if Nintendo gets their way, and there's a real chance of it cascading throughout the entire emulation scene.
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That is shitty but I doubt Nintendo actually cares for emulators of their old systems otherwise they would have sued all of them. I'm guessing they see Yuzu as direct competitor since you can play their 70$ game there.

Btw I don't want Nintendo to win and I don't think they will. Emulators are a gift for gamers but....
...talking about game preservation of 5 month game is another excuse for piracy, we all know that.
 
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Bonejack said:
I wonder what kinds of service Nintendo could offer for those people who're not willing to pay for a big new game? I legit can't think of any.
Offer a better system? Well that's an "easier said than done" thing. Offer on other systems? Why would they do that? Plus this wouldn't even mean better game performance because the games would still be developed for Switch first and before all.
Same with old games, they offer a (somewhat lukewarm) service, though i think that both the selection of games and the amount of money they want for it won't really change the minds of pirates.
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Yeah, I don't really see Gabe's statement as being all that meaningful here, the official offerings will always have some tradeoff or other that people might be dissatisfied by
 
As many have said, fuck Nintendo. Unless companies are willing to provide their old games (and not in overpriced collections where you need like 7 of them to get every game and it will still lack lesser known games) emulation is going to be better.
Obviously pirating newer games is a bit more of a gray area, but even then I'm not going to take a side of a billion dollar corporation because uwu someone might've played our video game. If anything, many pirated copies of TotK (if they are real and not people buying AND downloading a copy) should be a wake-up call to not price the games at seventy bucks which is a LOT for many, many countries.
 
Smash Kirby said:
Shoplifting is fine as long as it is below $900 if you are in a US big city. That is what the enforced standard is.
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It is, I also wouldn’t be pissed off if companies clamped down on it. I understand people pirate games and their reasoning behind it.

But I’m not going to sit here and justify shop lifting or pirating saying it’s because of lack of accessibility.
 
SunnyDays said:
Both Ryujinx and Yuzu, as well as most other major emulators, will refuse support to anyone who admits to piracy. Anything beyond that would be difficult to implement, though.

I can't speak for Yuzu, but Ryujinx will also refuse support and label pirate anyone whose Discord says they're playing an unreleased (pirated) game, at least for major titles, such as TOTK.
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Thanks for replying. I suppose that would be their defence but Nintendo's lawyers will point out that regardless of their intent, their software has been used to extensively pirate one of their games and that Yuzu have responsibility for this. Legally it's still a tough spot for them to get out of.

I thought for a while emulation is walking a tightrope, trying not to get caught in the crossfire while pirates and companies like Nintendo are firing canonballs at each other. It's a real conundrum to figure out just how emulation can be preserved without people exploiting it because Nintendo losing so many sales as an indirect consequence of emulation is a problem, regardless of whether they are going overboard in their reaction here.
 
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Enpsty said:
That is shitty but I doubt Nintendo actually cares for emulators of their old systems otherwise they would have sued all of them. I'm guessing they see Yuzu as direct competitor since you can play their 70$ game there.

Btw I don't want Nintendo to win and I don't think they will. Emulators are a gift for gamers but....
...talking about game preservation of 5 month game is another excuse for piracy, we all know that.
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I wouldn't be surprised if this suit acted like a can opener for Nintendo, giving them a more confident standing to pursue the currently grayer area of emulation. Who's gonna pay for Snes9x's defense fund? We'll see of course how this will be interpreted if it goes to court at all, but I'm definitely uneasy about it.
 
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SunnyDays said:
Currently Yuzu makes 30k in support per month through support. They'll need an injunction against Yuzu or else Yuzu will have a healthy defence fund. Heck, even if there was such an injunction, I imagine a GoFundMe for the defence would be quite successful, as this entire case will set precedent for the emulation community at large.
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The community can't afford that smoke. It's also funny to consider that a group of people who clearly DO use emulation for piracy are going to turn around and give tons of money to a product so that they can... continue not buying stuff. Also it's easy in month 1 for someone to have "fuck Nintendo righteous indignation", when it gets to month 15 with no end in sight, most people aren't going to continue to throw 1/5/10/20 dollars at Yuzu, especially when all the hot games are on the Switch successor.
 
Wtfpigeons said:
It is, I also wouldn’t be pissed off if companies clamped down on it. I understand people pirate games and their reasoning behind it.

But I’m not going to sit here and justify shop lifting or pirating saying it’s because of lack of accessibility.
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The US for instance is not a nation of laws but of political wills and always will be. There are old laws on the books that are no longer enforced. Nintendo is exerting political will onto Yuzu, if they don't Yuzu is encouraged in their actions and can get more brazen with their actions.

Current piracy enjoyers have said: "lol I'll just emulate it on my Steam Deck." I think that is what Nintendo will try to stop.
 
Really worried about the precedent this sets for the industry as a whole, and what ripple effect it might have for other emulators and the future of the emulation scene as a whole. It’s always been a grey area, Nintendo or not, and I fret that other emulators might err on the side of caution here. If this goes through, what if Xenia pulls plugs out of trepidation? All of a sudden, something as pivotal as Spec Ops: The Line is ejected into the stratosphere.

Sure, everyone and their spouse can play the plethora of indies on Switch that are available anywhere, and while the Switch definitely won’t have its own Spec Ops, there’s still a game like Xenoblade Chronicles X, which, as Wii U’s brick and the store closes down and copies gets thrown out, (and Nintendo might not show interest in a port) might run into serious availability issues several years from now. Not that people should toss themselves on whatever iso of the game they can find online, but I do think that it’s an example of a game not necessarily having to be made in the 90’s to become a preservation issue, hence why the importance of emulators should always be stressed, and their future to be looked at with care. Something that might be increasingly complicated now that we have a straight-up lawsuit making the rounds.

This being said however, count me in as someone who think that these kinds of Patreon-setups for emulators is somewhat shady and an even grayer area. Emulators has always been a somewhat idealistic endeavour, and throwing money into the equation changes that.
 
ertaboy356b said:
That Gabe statement has been propagated by pirates ever since. Valve is not even a full on game dev at that point in time. IMO valve should try making high budget AAA single player games without DRM and see how far it will go.
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I think it resonates with a bunch of us who grew up playing PC games because we lived it

between functionality, convenience of having everything in one spot, and sales Steam straight up actively made me want to buy games which was often not the case as a teenager(although actually having money certainly helped as well)
 
balgajo said:
While it could be logically correct it's obvious that it isn't written in good faith. I mean, if you want to sue a blender manufacturer because you lost your finger during use it doesn't feel right to start the case saying that a blender is a machine that allows people to lose their finger. It doesn't cause a good impression.
Especially when your own company uses one, showing that you're aware about the main reason why this kind of software exists and is just trying to deceive whoever is reading the case.
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I don't think it's good or bad faith, they're making a legal argument that an emulator can be used that way. A prosecutor in a murder trial might describe a drill as a tool that can be used to injure and kill people, even though that isn't its intended purpose.

Btw I don't think Nintendo should be suing emulator makers. Emulators are good and important for the whole video game hobby.
 
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For me, the issue is that emulators need to exist using best practices and iron-clad proof that their development exists separate from any hardware code or software specifically linked to the thing they are emulating.

If we agree that Emulators need to exist for the purposes of preservation (which is fundamentally an Academic exercise), then those Emulators need to follow the same principles you would see in Academia:

- No plagiarism or copying of anything that directly belongs to someone else, and a focus on open-book development that allows anyone to check and verify development is clear and above board

- Running for educational or informative purposes rather than being strictly for-profit enterprises

- A clear emphasis on preservation and encouraging users to follow best practices when using the software, rather than implicitly or explicitly promoting software piracy

The problem as I see it is that we're seeing more and more Emulator developers ignore the above principles in order to chase clout and Patreon dollars. Whether it's CEMU deliberately running a closed book for their Wii U emulator (and there have been a lot of questions about how they were able to get such an emulator running so quickly without relying on copied Nintendo code), to Dolphin including software keys they shouldn't have, to Yuzu using and promoting pirates games to draw more attention to their Patreon and platform, these organisations are all deliberately flying close to the sun because they're trying to drive up their own revenue.

If publicly available Emulators are going to be a thing that exist without issue within the gaming sphere, then the organisations that make them need to do better at being compliant and actually following the educational and preservation ideals that so many in the community espouse. Otherwise, it allows disingenuous clout chasers to ruin the scene and give room for court cases such as these.
 
Individualised said:
Absolutely no one should be cheering this on regardless of how you feel about piracy or not. This sets a very bad precedent regarding copyright that extends far past the topic of pirating current gen games and I find it shocking that anyone on this forum would even remotely suggest this is a good thing given how left-leaning we are here. I'm glad that the majority aren't.
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am I supposed to feel bad because a bunch of people engaged in Acts of Hubris and tried to turn an emulator into a moneymaking operation and are getting clapped in return
 
I think at this point we should all remove the word "preservation" from the discussion and use "availability" instead, because that's what it's about.
(And yes, i went and checked on my definitions from my first post on the last page.)

Now, wether or not preservation goes hand in hand with availability is a different discussion, and i'm not going to enter this one.
 
Wtfpigeons said:
Jesus Christ, why do people actually justify pirating constantly?

What you’re saying is like justifying shop lifting. “It’s ok because not a lot of people do it”.
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Comparing shoplifting, something that tends to be done by economically desperate people lacking basic necessities, to video game piracy is pretty fucking disingenuous.
 
Thoughts along the lines of "preservation is just an excuse when it comes to modern systems" or trying to say preservation and accessibility need to be curtailed for the sake of combatting piracy are really kinda shitty. Feels like a take that doesn't recognize the last decade of games becoming "legally" inaccessible at incredibly fast rates.

I get that some shitty people on the internet will use that as some kind of weird moral shield, but like letting annoying people on the internet dictate how you feel about corporations trying to vault art so they can make as much money as possible off it seems kinda corny.
 
There is always going to be a tug of war between the need to actually preserve video game history from companies that frankly see their back catalogues as a means to make a cheap buck when it suits them (something Nintendo are notorious for), and people who will exploit this ideal to get games without paying what they owe. Until we get a codified set of rules as to what can or cannot be put on an emulator, we're always going to have this cycle where people scope creep to see what they can get away with, Nintendo and other gaming companies slap them down, then someone else comes in to fill the gaps.

If you feel passionately about emulation as means to preserve history, or just play a game at a higher framerate, then you do have to point fingers at the people misusing the system as much as you do at Nintendo being overbearing. Because if Nintendo's claim of those lost sales are legitimate and they have the receipts to back up their claims, then they have lost a lot of revenue and will be on the warpath to ensure it doesn't happen again.

I've been around the block enough to know that Nintendo are utterly ruthless when it comes to stuff like this. We can discuss the ethics of their position until the cows come home, but knowing their history, I would absolutely not put myself in a position where I am earning a revenue from their products without their explicit consent. You never know when their patience is going to run out or if you'll be made a fall guy.
 
Vookatos said:
As many have said, fuck Nintendo. Unless companies are willing to provide their old games (and not in overpriced collections where you need like 7 of them to get every game and it will still lack lesser known games) emulation is going to be better.
Obviously pirating newer games is a bit more of a gray area, but even then I'm not going to take a side of a billion dollar corporation because uwu someone might've played our video game. If anything, many pirated copies of TotK (if they are real and not people buying AND downloading a copy) should be a wake-up call to not price the games at seventy bucks which is a LOT for many, many countries.
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interesting take. Nintendo is one of the few companies that hasn't laid of people in an industry where game development has demonstrably become unfeasibly expensive and where you see headlines every days calling game development unsustainable. This whole idea of "your games are too expensive so I am going to pirate them" is oversimplifying this matter a lot.

I would also not call "pirating newer games" a "grey area". What's grey about that?

The outrage of people when a luxury product that only serves the purpose of entertainment is somehow not priced right. Meanwhile people can't afford basic necessities. We live in a capitalist society where companies run first and foremost based on maximizing their profits.

I'd still rather have a cooperation that can deliver consistent quality while not firing their employees in order to improve profit margins (and that can survive on this strategy for a long time).

What really needs to be done to address the whole "preservation" argument is some legal framework for ALL media to become part of the public domain after a certain time. This way we could legally play all the unavailable historic games for free, courts would not be bothered with such silly lawsuits and there would be more clarity for everybody at the expense of some profits for corporations.
 
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Wtfpigeons said:
Could say the same about pretty much every luxury goods, you‘re also not free to take them as you please.
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Again, I'm not incentivizing anyone to do so.
But your comparison is completely delusional.

Digital games are digital media, and digital media has no scarcity.
You could make this argument about going to gamestop and stealing a physical game or even a game/credit code card. As those are scarce items, produced in limited quantities, palpable, non-renewable.

Stealing them also takes away directly from the store owner, not just nintendo.
This doesn't happen with digital media as there's no middleman (gamestop) involved.

There's no comparison to be made here.
 
BassForever said:
The community can't afford that smoke. It's also funny to consider that a group of people who clearly DO use emulation for piracy are going to turn around and give tons of money to a product so that they can... continue not buying stuff. Also it's easy in month 1 for someone to have "fuck Nintendo righteous indignation", when it gets to month 15 with no end in sight, most people aren't going to continue to throw 1/5/10/20 dollars at Yuzu, especially when all the hot games are on the Switch successor.
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What makes you think people who pirate some games don't pay for others, or even those very same games? Pirates of media tend to be enthusiasts of that media as well, and enthusiasts tend to spend money on their enthusiast hobby.

Nintendo says 1 million copies of TOTK were pirated, and that means 1 million sales were lost. How many of the people who pirated though have bought other Nintendo games this year, went on to buy TOTK, pirated TOTK because it was easier than dumping it themselves, or would otherwise not be able to afford the game? How many of those pirated copies were an attempt at boycotting the game too over developer decisions, namely the choice to sell it for $70?

Your statements are with a lot of conviction, but there's not really evidence that piracy actually impacts sales much, nor that pirates aren't actually contributing to the video game industry financially? There's been multiple studies in the music industry that consistently indicate that pirates of that medium are the biggest spenders within it. The EU commission published a report in 2017 indicating that piracy actually increases legitimate sales of video-games.

To return to the point though, we've already seen the Patreon of Yuzu increase by about $5,000 USD since this lawsuit dropped. There's only indication that the emulation community has access to money, and is willing to spend it. I do not see a reason to believe that people, who have donated in reaction to the lawsuit against Yuzu, would not donate to a defence fund for Yuzu.
 
Let be honest here, majority that using Yuzu are for pirating Nintendo Switch games. Only minority using it to dump their own purchased games. This is the issue here. It's ok if Yuzu ONLY allowed for dumping purchased Switch games. But it's not ok if Yuzu can be using by everyone to play Switch games for free. It's unacceptable.
 
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Hajeman said:
Let be honest here, majority that using Yuzu are for pirating Nintendo Switch games. Only minority using it to dump their own purchased games. This is the issue here. It's ok if Yuzu ONLY allowed for dumping purchased Switch games. But it's not ok if Yuzu can be using by everyone to play Switch games for free. It's unacceptable.
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That's kinda the opposite of what Nintendo's arguing though. Among others, it's saying that Yuzu incentivizes people to dump their legally acquired games (or other decrypted files), which Nintendo considers a copyright infringing activity for which Yuzu is (secondarily) liable. (See pp. 37-38 of the filed docs)
 
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I think this is more about emulator teams using Patreon to develop emulators than necessarily emulation itself. I am sure Nintendo would love to have emulation be deemed illegal, but realistically that won’t happen so they are probably going from the angle that these teams profit from piracy (and Yuzu’s case is a bit tricky given they are emulating a current gen device) and as such there have to be regulations tied to this process.
 
Regulus Tera said:
Comparing shoplifting, something that tends to be done by economically desperate people lacking basic necessities, to video game piracy is pretty fucking disingenuous.
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Not really considering the example used towards me about poverty in parts of the world.

But are we going to assume that every shop lifter is an economically desperate person lacking basic necessities?

Because we can go deeper into that if you want.
 
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SunnyDays said:
Nintendo says 1 million copies of TOTK were pirated, and that means 1 million sales were lost. How many of the people who pirated though have bought other Nintendo games this year, went on to buy TOTK, pirated TOTK because it was easier than dumping it themselves, or would otherwise not be able to afford the game? How many of those pirated copies were an attempt at boycotting the game too over developer decisions, namely the choice to sell it for $70?

Your statements are with a lot of conviction, but there's not really evidence that piracy actually impacts sales much, nor that pirates aren't actually contributing to the video game industry financially? There's been multiple studies in the music industry that consistently indicate that pirates of that medium are the biggest spenders within it. The EU commission published a report in 2017 indicating that piracy actually increases legitimate sales of video-games.
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The 1 million copies thing is line 62 in the complaint. It is not used to illustrate lost sales, but rather to illustrate that the specific context surrounding Yuzu's behavior at this point was due to behavior that can only be attributed to piracy in Nintendo's eyes - TOTK wasn't out yet, it was pirated en masse and the Yuzu team appeared to have relied on work from pirates to get the game running according to the PCGamer interview. A lot of other emulation projects have extremely stringent rules surrounding any work that may be unlawfully obtained; the N64 LLE emulation dev scene was pretty much iced for 2 decades because the reference sheet was leaked in the early 2000s and the N64 was seen as too poisoned to keep working on. (HLE emulators did exist, with their own issues of course.)

They expect the telemetry in Yuzu itself to prove this fact beyond a shadow of a doubt if it comes to discovery (honestly the fact that Yuzu contains telemetry should have been an immediate red flag to anyone using it but that's besides the point).

Notably, their prayer for relief does not do any "pirated copies to lost sales" conversion - they just ask for a ~308k fee (2 counts of 150k, 3 counts of 2.5k).
 
I guess this answers Kit & Krista's allegations that Nintendo isn't happy about Totk Sales.

Seriously though: Fuck Nintendo.
 
kasparov77 said:
Again, I'm not incentivizing anyone to do so.
But your comparison is completely delusional.

Digital games are digital media, and digital media has no scarcity.
You could make this argument about going to gamestop and stealing a physical game or even a game/credit code card. As those are scarce items, produced in limited quantities, palpable, non-renewable.

Stealing them also takes away directly from the store owner, not just nintendo.
This doesn't happen with digital media as there's no middleman (gamestop) involved.

There's no comparison to be made here.
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Right so peoples time, effort and money spent to achieve that digital media is worthless in your point of view? Due to it being digital.
 
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PixelKnight said:
This is a false equivalence and not really relevant to the thread.
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It’s definitely relevant to the thread, people are justifying stealing digital property due to the fact it’s digital.

Both are achieved through people spending time, effort and money on a product yet people don’t seem the understand that stealing either is wrong.
 
kasparov77 said:
Being skeptical about the financial damage a company suffered from piracy ≠ justifying piracy or even influencing someone to do so.

You also have to understand that sometimes, piracy is a matter of accessibility. Some companies (notably nintendo) are very unfriendly when it comes to that - they don't bother with adjusting prices properly to coincide with certain countries economic reality nor do they offer proper discounts to their games (at least not commonly).

I used to be the kind of person who would say "well, if you can't buy it just wait till you can, save some money, don't be an asshole and pirate".

Now I realize it's way more complicated than that.
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Or in some cases, when online stores are price adjusted, assholes take advantage of that to buy from these cheaper stores and then the prices are increased. (Not disagreeing with your point, but this post really reminded me of how much I hate that.)
 
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Razgriz said:
the Yuzu team appeared to have relied on work from pirates to get the game running according to the PCGamer interview.
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The statement in question you're referring to is "Most issues with TotK in Yuzu (thus far) have been fixed with minor changes that were quick to debug and easy to resolve. I think the fact that the community was able to solve many of these challenges with mods well ahead of us is evidence to that", right? I don't see where this says those changes were upstreamed to Yuzu-proper. It says "ahead of us", implying they then solved those challenges on their own after the game released. Believing they're saying anything more than that is mere speculation.
 
kasparov77 said:
Being skeptical about the financial damage a company suffered from piracy ≠ justifying piracy or even influencing someone to do so.

You also have to understand that sometimes, piracy is a matter of accessibility. Some companies (notably nintendo) are very unfriendly when it comes to that - they don't bother with adjusting prices properly to coincide with certain countries economic reality nor do they offer proper discounts to their games (at least not commonly).

I used to be the kind of person who would say "well, if you can't buy it just wait till you can, save some money, don't be an asshole and pirate".

Now I realize it's way more complicated than that.
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How is it more complicated? There are tons of people who choose to not play Nintendo games, because they think their prices are too high, and instead choose the games available on Steam or similar stores.
 
I posted this on the other site, and I think Yuzu should countersue and argue that their EULA is too restrictive and doesn't allow true ownership of the games. If you argue from another person's premise you will lose that fight 90% of that time. They need to change the narrative and where they are arguing from.

1. Nintendo's refusal to release games, even older system games on PC, created the problem of piracy in the first place. The Nintendo Switch cannot play all WiiU and 3DS games. The Yuzu team is future-proofing their emulator to prevent the Switch from being another dead platform with titles that will not get ported.
2. Nintendo's action against Yuzu are directly targeting and harming consumers and how they want to play their purchased Switch games. Any use of leaked games is only to allow for day 1 optimization of games of legal owners. Pirates will pirate and use other emulators even without Yuzu existing.
3. Nintendo themselves uses emulation to run their own games. They may have their own backups and have a vault of preserved games, but if something were to happen to Nintendo all of their preserved library. Nintendo has shown in the past that they are against public preservation that they aren't in control over and this lawsuit over Yuzu is in the same boat.

These are somewhat shaky arguments, but I could see these going further if they do a countersuit against Nintendo. Yuzu needs to go on the offensive, otherwise they are fighting a losing battle.
 
TanookiTom said:
interesting take. Nintendo is one of the few companies that hasn't laid of people in an industry where game development has demonstrably become unfeasibly expensive and where you see headlines every days calling game development unsustainable. This whole idea of "your games are too expensive so I am going to pirate them" is oversimplifying this matter a lot.

I would also not call "pirating newer games" a "grey area". What's grey about that?

The outrage of people when a luxury product that only serves the purpose of entertainment is somehow not priced right. Meanwhile people can't afford basic necessities. We live in a capitalist society where companies run first and foremost based on maximizing their profits.

I'd still rather have a cooperation that can deliver consistent quality while not firing their employees in order to improve profit margins (and that can survive on this strategy for a long time).

What really needs to be done to address the whole "preservation" argument is some legal framework for ALL media to become part of the public domain after a certain time. This way we could legally play all the unavailable historic games for free, courts would not be bothered with such silly lawsuits and there would be more clarity for everybody at the expensive of some profits for corporations.
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Just because Nintendo isn't laying off people left and right you don't have to hand them how they're better at being a greedy corporation that tries to fuck up game preservation as of today.

You don't have to commend them for overpricing games because they won't fire people. It's not an either or situation. TotK has been pirated a million times according to them and they still haven't gutted half their company, so they clearly can take someone from Brazil pirating an iso when we don't even know they haven't bought the game (PC emulation allows for more freedom while playing such as additional settings and mods). There are layoffs not because other games don't sell well, often the opposite. Have you not seen the record profits followed by companies closing down?

Game industry is in a pretty good place and has demonstrated that it can take all the piracy and still make massive profits, so I'm not particularly concerned about it, hense the gray area comment. Asking for media to become public domain is a pie in the sky dream akin to asking capitalist society to be destroyed. Am I for it? Hell yes. Is it viable? No. Should we therefore arrest people pirating media? Also no.
 
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SunnyDays said:
It says "ahead of us", implying they then solved those challenges on their own after the game released. Believing they're saying anything more than that is mere speculation.
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The problem is that, assuming that these fixes were indeed relatively small (and they very well could be), it can prove very difficult for them to prove that they came up with them on their own rather than used the code from the forks. It's a really nasty scenario, which is why you sometimes get "do not talk about this" blockades in the more legitimate emulation communities. It's less a problem for really old consoles (again, the N64 was iced for 2 decades until Ares was made).

Large companies have entire teams dedicated to avoiding these sorts of risks and even they get in trouble for it sometimes. Cleanrooming legally risky code is hard and for communities that don't have that many developers, sometimes just icing the entire thing for a few years is the only safe option for them.
 
SunnyDays said:
So, I'm not gonna respond to anyone in particular since I just read through all 7 pages of this thread, and have a lot I'd need to reply to.

I'll start with this: I am bias for both emulation and piracy as methods of game preservation, game ownership, and even mere game acquisition. I don't think that we should be pirating games or emulating consoles that are currently for sale, however I think it's distinctly harmful to advocate for case law to set precedent against that. Such a ruling would have to be done legislatively, with care, but I err on the side of "let people behave immorally"; we don't need to make every bad thing someone does illegal. People are allowed to be just bad people and/or do generally bad things.

I dislike the Yuzu developers as a whole. I think their practices of hiding distribution of Early Access behind their Patreon is stinky, and I think that their development philosophy of targeting compatibility with the latest hit-thing is pretty uncouth. Contrasting to Ryujinx who, while they do aim for compatibility, they aim for it in a way that increases emulator accuracy. Yuzu makes use of hackish code and shortcuts to make things work, while Ryujinx tends to follow the practice of "if we make it more accurate and performant, it'll become more compatible on its own".

I will clarify, for the sake of the discussion, that while distribution of Early Access is behind their Patreon, as I'm sure many are aware, Yuzu's under GPL 3.0 or later, and as a result, redistribution of the Yuzu emulator is free and legal. There's even a Github with access to it, however I'll refrain from naming it as that particular distribution is also explicitly positive on piracy, and distributes things like the prod.keys and shader caches; both of which violate the DMCA and should be retrieved by users manually instead.

I'm not sure if Nintendo has a case here, but if they win this case, depending on the court's opinion, it may have a ripple effect upon all emulators, including ones of legitimately archival consoles. The entire retro-gaming scene's going to be watching closely, because the outcome could be disastrous. On the other hand, should Nintendo (somehow) lose, it could sanction more open distribution and monetization of emulators, as well as it could set precedent that emulator developers can lay in the territory of being given "the benefit of the doubt" when it comes to pirating games, including ones that are yet to be released. I think this is a bad result too, but a lesser-bad one.

I dislike that Nintendo even attempted this lawsuit. The outcomes don't look good regardless. It'll also be difficult if Nintendo files for an injunction on Yuzu's Patreon and a freeze on the funds they've recieved from them. Currently, Yuzu makes around $30k/month from their Patreon, and with this lawsuit and the fear its creating in the community, that value's increasing by the hour. They could fund a solid legal defence with those funds, but if Nintendo were to successfully file injunction, Yuzu would have to resort to a proper legal defence fund, from which we don't know how successful that'd even be as the initial outpouring of support slows.

Best case scenario, this case gets thrown out, but given this isn't a SLAPP case, and how well Nintendo funds their legal team, I find that next to impossible.
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This is the best post in this thread
 
Smash Kirby said:
I posted this on the other site, and I think Yuzu should countersue and argue that their EULA is too restrictive and doesn't allow true ownership of the games. If you argue from another person's premise you will lose that fight 90% of that time. They need to change the narrative and where they are arguing from.
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Except the lawsuit primarily alledges that they are reverse engineering/bypassing TPMs, something which is illegal by law (DMCA § 1201), not by their EULAs. The piracy is a secondary complaint.

I despise 1201 a lot (it's the worst part of the DMCA in my personal opinion, in no small part because even the most token of TPM counts as illegal to bypass - you can use completely broken security technology but bypassing it will still be seen as illegal), but this defense will absolutely not fly in any courtroom.

"Nintendo has bad game availability" is not a defense against "you are bypassing and reverse engineering our security".
 
pre-release emulation is a huge problem for these companies because now people who would pay for these games have to steal them to play them as soon as possible
 
Smash Kirby said:
I posted this on the other site, and I think Yuzu should countersue and argue that their EULA is too restrictive and doesn't allow true ownership of the games. If you argue from another person's premise you will lose that fight 90% of that time. They need to change the narrative and where they are arguing from.

1. Nintendo's refusal to release games, even older system games on PC, created the problem of piracy in the first place. The Nintendo Switch cannot play all WiiU and 3DS games. The Yuzu team is future-proofing their emulator to prevent the Switch from being another dead platform with titles that will not get ported.
2. Nintendo's action against Yuzu are directly targeting and harming consumers and how they want to play their purchased Switch games. Any use of leaked games is only to allow for day 1 optimization of games of legal owners. Pirates will pirate and use other emulators even without Yuzu existing.
3. Nintendo themselves uses emulation to run their own games. They may have their own backups and have a vault of preserved games, but if something were to happen to Nintendo all of their preserved library. Nintendo has shown in the past that they are against public preservation that they aren't in control over and this lawsuit over Yuzu is in the same boat.

These are somewhat shaky arguments, but I could see these going further if they do a countersuit against Nintendo. Yuzu needs to go on the offensive, otherwise they are fighting a losing battle.
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Stanning the Yuzu folks as some champions of emulation and defenders of the good is very funny considering the allegations against them.
 
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