At the beginning of the week, an indictment was filed that… Game File-Journalists Stephen Totilo is presentannounced that Nintendo has officially filed a lawsuit against Tropic Haze, the developer of the Switch emulator Yuzu submitted. In detail, this is a legal complaint from Nintendo of America that was recently received by the District Court of Rhode Island (USA), where the Yuzu developer's headquarters are also located. A preliminary statement calls for the emulator to be switched off and compensation for damages.
In general, Nintendo points out, “[…] that the defendant and its representatives are fully aware of the use of Yuzu by others to circumvent and promote piracy on a colossal scale [seien].” Yuzu allows users to play pirated Switch games on Windows, Linux, Apple or Android systems, it said.
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With Yuzu in hand, nothing stops a user from obtaining and playing illegal copies of virtually any game made for the Nintendo Switch without paying a dime to Nintendo or any of the hundreds of other game developers and publishers for which games are made and sold. In fact, Yuzu turns general computing devices into tools for massive intellectual property infringements of copyrighted works by Nintendo and others. Without Yuzu's decryption of Nintendo's codes, it would not be possible to play unauthorized copies of the games.
The title released in mid-May last year is special The Legend of Zelda – Tears of the Kingdom listed as the biggest Switch release of 2023, which was allegedly pirated over a million times across all systems in the week and a half before the official release. According to information, Tears of the Kingdom sold over 20 million copies last year and, in addition to good reviews, was a great commercial success for Nintendo.
Although Yuzu and Tropic Haze themselves do not publish or offer their own ROMs, according to Nintendo, most websites that offer ROMs point directly to the Switch emulator. Also, Nintendo claims that Yuzu makes over $30,000 per month on Patreon would take and that the registered users on the platform had doubled in the last few weeks before the release of Tears of the Kingdom. Even if emulators themselves are not illegal, playing pirated copies is. For this reason, Nintendo's current lawsuit is demanding that Yuzu be shut down and compensation in an as yet undisclosed amount.
The issue remains exciting in any case, because even though Nintendo is well known for its strict approach to the manipulation of its products and infringements of intellectual property, the Japanese have in the past been more successful in court against ROM websites, hackers, fan games. games and mod chip manufacturers and less against emulators. Finally, the well-known and popular 3DS emulator Citra also comes from Tropic Haze, which was recently released for the Meta Quest VR glasses. You can find out how the case will continue, whether the court will allow the lawsuit and what Tropic Haze's statement will be from us at GamersGlobal.
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