Nintendo may have won its battle to put the most popular Nintendo Switch emulators out of business. In March, he sued Yuzu out of existence, and now he may have convinced Yuzu's main competitor, Ryujinx, to go away as well.
“Yesterday, Nintendo contacted gdkchan and offered him a deal to stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets under its control,” writes developer and moderator ripinperiperi. in discord. “While awaiting confirmation on whether they will accept this deal, the organization has been eliminated, so I think it's safe to say what the outcome will be.”
The rest of ripinperiperi's message is in praise of the project, including a couple of videos showing the Ryujinx team's progress on the iOS and Android ports of the Nintendo Switch emulator, among other major changes, which will now presumably never ship.
Nintendo neither confirmed nor denied The edge who made a deal with the developer. Instead, he pointed me to the head of communications and public affairs at the Entertainment Software Association. We are waiting for a response from ESA now.
Compared to Yuzu, Ryujinx was thought to be relatively untouchable. Lead developer GDKChan was rumored to be based in emulation-friendly Brazil, although I never found evidence of this when I reported on the plight of the emulator world earlier this year. We certainly never heard of a lawsuit against Ryujinx, nor did Nintendo go after its Discord server or DMCA its GitHub like we saw with other Switch emulators. (By the way, GitHub does not currently show a DMCA takedown request for Ryujinx.)
While emulators are technically legal in a broad sense, there's nothing stopping Nintendo from filing lawsuits that indie developers can't afford to fight, filing DMCA takedown requests, or simply lobbying organizations like Discord and GitHub. so they can remove things themselves.
There are even legal theories that suggest that Nintendo could would have a case if it went to court, not because the emulators are illegal, but because of the other copy protection mechanisms on the Switch and the argument that some of these modern emulators are trafficking in piracy.
It also seems that Nintendo could return to the legal sphere in general: this weekend, Popular YouTuber RetroGameCorps Announced that Nintendo has filed enough copyright notices, just for showing Nintendo games like Zelda Wind Waker HD running on various hardware in his videos, that his entire YouTube channel is at risk of being deleted. As a result, it says it will no longer show Nintendo games.
While it seems likely that this is the end of the official Ryujinx team, several members of which are saying goodbye on their Discord, it may not be entirely over. 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, as with Yuzu, Ryujinx forks will spread across GitHub and the web at large, or that its code will become the basis for future emulators.
