Nintendo's threat has not taken long to take effect. The creators of Yuzu, the Nintendo Switch emulator Most famously, they have absolutely eliminated any trace of their emulator on the Internet, deleting all content from their website and eliminating any type of support for the software immediately. Yuzu is now history, but there are still solutions to emulate Switch.
Yuzu, the Switch emulator, disappears
Nintendo has only needed a week since the lawsuit was made official to completely knock down the emulation software. The creators of Yuzu have not resisted, and have accepted the payment of 2.400.000 dollars (that's nothing) and the immediate removal of the website, the software code and everything related to the famous emulator.
Furthermore, in an act of absolute submission (as not to do so) and in a metaphor of surrendering weapons, the domain yuzu-emu.org has been transferred to Nintendo, as well as all the tools, both at the software and hardware level, that have served them to circumvent Nintendo's protections.
The official yuzu website shows the following text:
Hello yuz-ers and Citra fans:
We are writing to you today to inform you that Yuzu and Yuzu's support for Citra will be discontinued effective immediately.
Yuzu and her team have always been against piracy. We began the projects in good faith, out of passion for Nintendo and its consoles and games, and we had no intention of causing harm. But now we see that because our projects can bypass Nintendo's technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to widespread piracy. In particular, we were deeply disappointed when users used our software to leak game content before its release and ruin the experience for legitimate buyers and fans.
We have come to the decision that we cannot continue to allow this to happen. Piracy was never our intention, and we believe that video game and console piracy should end. Starting today, we will be taking our code repositories offline, closing our Patreon accounts and Discord servers, and soon shutting down our websites. We hope that our actions are a small step towards ending piracy of the works of all creators.
Thank you for your years of support and for understanding our decision.
Citra also affected
The most surprising thing is that this entire tsunami has also affected Citra, the Nintendo 3DS emulator, which has also been absorbed by demand and where its creator has also confirmed the fall of the software. In this way, the emulator website shows the same farewell message from Yuzu, and the Github source code has also been completely removed.
Is there an alternative?
But if you thought all this was going to end here, you're wrong. On the one hand there is the result of the ruling, something that we have yet to hear, since until now this is nothing more than a consensual agreement between Tropic Haze (creators of Yuzu) and Nintendo. Considering that Yuzu did not include any of the cryptographic keys (Keys) necessary to run the ROMs, there may still be a small lifeline for the defendants.
And it would not make sense for such a huge lawsuit to fall on them for the simple fact that “your software is used for piracy.” Of course it works, but technically it doesn't work for it at the time you download it. The resolution of the case could set a precedent for both sides, whether the software is cleared of blame or is ultimately found guilty even without violating any intellectual property by default.
But where we should look now is on Ryūjinx, another Nintendo Switch emulation software that continues to work and whose website is still operational for the moment. This emulator, although quite popular, did not reach the numbers of Yuzu, but it is interesting to know that it was the first to run The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom correctly. It remains to be seen if Nintendo decides to go after them as well, something that would be normal if we take into account that it works in the same way as Yuzu.
Bad times for emulation lovers.
Source: Yuzu