Nintendo Goes After Yuzu Emulator In Court, Cites Sad Tweets

Nintendo, a lawsuit-filing company that occasionally dabbles in hit video games, is pursuing the creators of Yuzu, an emulator that can play Switch games on a PC and phones.

As reported by Stephen Totilo's Stephen Totilo, Nintendo is seeking to not only have the popular emulator shut down, but is also looking for "damages for unlawful circumvention of copyright protection systems...and unlawful trafficking in circumvention technology".

Seeking to have an emulator shut down now, in 2024, is certainly a bold move; emulators for Nintendo consoles have existed for as long as emulators have been around, and most seem to get by just fine. They key difference here, as Nintendo point out, is that Yuzu is an emulator for hardware that is still the company's "current" generation, meaning it's a lot easier to argue that it's facilitating piracy than, say, an emulator for an older machine where retail game sales are less important.

In an attempt to back this up, Nintendo is looking to link an estimated one million downloads of Tears of the Kingdom from torrent sites to a huge upswing in Yuzu downloads at the time of the game's release. Of even greater--and funnier--interest to me, though, is a secondary approach the company is taking in this lawsuit: making a sad face over spoilers.

The prevalence of piracy of Zelda: TotK in the days leading up to its release, in large part through emulators such as Yuzu, harmed law-abiding Nintendo customers too. For example, many fans of The Legend of Zelda were forced to avoid social media to prevent seeing spoilers and preserve their surprise and delight for the actual game release...

The suit then embeds some tweets, one from a Twitter Blue subscriber, complaining about how they were going to have to jump off social media in fear of the game being spoiled for them. I know spoiler culture is out of control at the moment, but I'll be disappointed if Nintendo's use of sad tweets here manages to establish some kind of pissbaby spoiler precedent in actual law.

Not as disappointed as we'll be if this suit results in any changes to the laws surrounding emulators themselves--which are absolutely essential to stuff like game preservation--but a little disappointed is still disappointed.