Nintendo may have just won its battle to put the most popular Nintendo Switch emulators out of business. In March, it sued Yuzu to stop it – and now it may have convinced Yuzu's main competitor, Ryujinx, to quit too.
“Yesterday gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and offered to stop working on the project and remove the organization and all related assets over which he has control,” writes developer and moderator ripinperiperi on Discord. “While we await confirmation as to whether he would agree to this agreement, the organization has been removed, so I think it is safe to say what the outcome will be.”
The rest of ripinperiperi's message is a eulogy for the project, including two videos showing the Ryujinx team's progress on the iOS and Android ports of the Nintendo Switch emulator, as well as other key changes – ones that now presumably will never be released become.
Nintendo would neither confirm nor deny this The edge that it made a deal with the developer. Instead, Nintendo spokesman Eddie Garcia mysteriously referred me to the Entertainment Software Association's public affairs director, Aubrey Quinn – who said she couldn't speak on behalf of Nintendo. I guess I've made the detour.
Compared to Yuzu, Ryujinx was considered relatively untouchable. Rumor has it that lead developer GDKChan was based in emulation-friendly Brazil, although I found no evidence of this when I reported on the plight of the emulator world earlier this year. Certainly we've never heard of a lawsuit against Ryujinx, nor has Nintendo sued its Discord server or DMCA sued its GitHub like we've seen with other Switch emulators. (Incidentally, GitHub does not currently display a DMCA takedown request for Ryujinx.)
While emulators are technically legal in the broadest sense, there's nothing stopping Nintendo from filing lawsuits that indie developers can't afford, filing DMCA takedown requests, or simply putting pressure on organizations like Discord and GitHub to shut things down themselves bring.
There are even legal theories that suggest Nintendo could win if it goes to court – not because emulators are illegal, but because of the other copy protection mechanisms in the Switch and the argument that some of these modern emulators are pirating.
It also looks like Nintendo is back on the legal path in general: This weekend, popular YouTuber RetroGameCorps announced that Nintendo had filed enough copyright strikes – just for showing Nintendo games like Zelda Wind Waker HD in his videos runs on different hardware – that his entire YouTube channel is threatened with deletion. As a result, he says he will no longer be showing Nintendo games.
While it's likely that this is the end of the official Ryujinx team, with several members saying goodbye to it in its Discord, it may not be quite over yet. Sometimes a coup can wrest control from a distributed group of developers like this; We haven't heard from GDKChan yet. It's also possible that, like Yuzu, forks of Ryujinx will spread on GitHub and across the web, or that their code will become the basis of future emulators.