Bad news for the world of video games. Emulation is a topic that can and does generate controversy. On the one hand, it is the only way that, for example, I can play Master System and Mega Drive titles, like Sonic or Cool Spot, games that I had and can no longer play. On the other side we have cases like Yuzu and Citra, two console emulators. Nintendo that are still for sale, and not only that.
It was news when "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom" arrived on PC before the Switch. That is, we were able to play it sooner on an emulator than on the console where, in theory, that game should live, without the possibility of playing it on another platform. This has been the last straw for Nintendo and they have used it in the trial to eliminate the Yuzu and Citra emulators in one fell swoop.
Nintendo and piracy, a never-ending story
That Nintendo has spent and spends a lot of time trying to ensure that we cannot even play Super Mario Bros. unless it is on an NES or in some of its own reboots is nothing new. But that is one thing and the other is what happened with the last episode of the Zelda saga: it would have been downloaded more than a million times a week before the official launch. Me, I can't fool anyone and sometimes I play with RetroArch + IT ISI see there piracy at its finest.
On the one hand, it's impossible that your Switch broke and you bought the new game. The first, yes, possible, but not all together: without Switch you are not going to buy the game. Another positive point of emulation would not apply either, and that is keep a work alive. You cannot bring back to life something that has not even been born yet.
So all this has been the perfect storm for Nintendo and it has taken advantage of it, which makes us wonder if it was not the video game giant itself who would have leaked the game to achieve its goal.
Yuzu and Citra disappear from GitHub…
…and soon your web pages will do the same and also their web pages. When I started writing this article, at least the Yuzu page It was accessible, but now I have tried to access the official pages of Yuzu and Citra and both are "hijacked" by the same message. In it they explain that Yuzu and Citra they are going to be discontinued "with immediate effect."
In their words, they started in good faith and were always against piracy, but they have realized that what they have created allows them to bypass Nintendo's protections and that is being used for piracy. Therefore, they decide to say goodbye.
Another problem seems to be that its creators have been making a lot of money. When the Yuzu page was available, you could see that a paid “Early Access” version was available, and with this They earned approximately $30.000 a month.
In the end they have agreed to end the project and pay a compensation of 2,4 million dollars to Nintendo. It's pocket change for a company of this size, but in reality that's not what they've earned. What they have managed to do is send a message: beware of pirating Nintendo games. Now the video game community will take it more calmly… or not.
There are already forks of the emulators
As happened with youtube-dl in its day, shortly after the judicial resolution and the disappearance of the emulators there is already forks thereof. We must not forget that they were open source and that anyone can do it, so they can continue to be downloaded from unofficial repositories. And so it will continue.
How all this affects emulation remains to be seen. It is possible that another emulator will come out that is not profitable and that will be enough for it to continue existing, that we will not have any new ones until the consoles stop being manufactured... we will have to see.
Image: Assembly from image generated with DALL-E