Yuzu & Citra devs fold to Nintendo's demands | Pay $2.3million to settle, take down github, domains, patreon, discord, with immediate effect.

merthyr1831@lemmy.world to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 551 points – Yuzu is dead
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A sad day for emulation and open source advocates, and a reminder that Nintendo can and will destroy you if they see fit.

Hopefully their works will live in the saved repos just as ReVanced was able to live on after YouTube shut the original project down.

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It's a sad day. Fuck Nintendo.

Yuzu gave them the opening to sue though. If they had been more circumspect - "Oh this is to develop homebrew / indie games nudge nudge" then maybe Nintendo wouldn't have unleashed the lawyers or done so ineffectively. After all it wouldn't be Yuzu's fault if some wicked website corrupted their pure intentions by releasing device keys or patches that allowed their emulator run commercial games. But they were more blatant than that.

Also from an empathic perspective, of course Nintendo were going to sue. Yuzu should have known they would since that's what console platforms do when something interferes with their profits. Yuzu is doubly bad since it interferes with hardware sales and game sales unlike custom firmware / cartridges which only affect game sales.

Of course the genie is already out of the bottle. Yuzu's source code and binaries were on github for anyone to clone / fork. All the games are out in the wild. The piracy will carry on. I think it's fair to say the NSP is effectively dead as a platform at this point. If a NSP2 turns up this year, as rumored, then I expect it will have revised anti-piracy measures and potentially a heavy online service aspect to go with it - it's far easier to detect pirates and wield the banhammer when a device is online.

I don't really get people saying fuck Nintendo. It's their IP, and Yuzu team was pretty blatant it's made for piracy, boasting how good it works with TotK. It's not what you do when you try to stay under the radar. Regarding Switch 2, this exactly what happened with DS and 3DS. DS was so easy to pirate Nintendo went ultra ham on piracy protection measures in 3DS, which took a good while to break. I'd expect the same with Switch 2.Which will probably make things annoying for people who will buy the system

I don’t really get people saying fuck Nintendo. It’s their IP, and Yuzu team was pretty blatant it’s made for piracy

Because a significant percent of people have always seen IP as theft and IP lawsuits as shakedowns. Real Talk - IP was codified to solve one problem (it wasn't casual piracy, it was inventors being ripped off by evil businesses), and it made that problem worse. We should've just thrown it out from there and tried something else, but then the evil businesses convinced the soccer moms that their little Billy listening to Metallica on Napster was everything wrong with this country.

It’s not what you do when you try to stay under the radar

And people walked down the street smoking pot in my state before it was legalized. We still said "FUCK the war on drugs" when they got harassed by cops.

If their shit wasn't so expensive and their games were released on PC, nobody would pirate it. Nintendo is shooting themselves on the foot then crying foul.

The switch is probably the cheapest mainstream gaming device. The games are expensive, granted. But they would definitely also be pirated on PC...

But they would definitely also be pirated on PC…

There's a reason why Valve became an industry giant. Piracy is an issue of service, not price.

Each dev kit is $450. Being able to test on an emulator is free. Sure, you ultimately want to test on hardware, but indie dev teams aren't going to shell out that kind of money for each developer. Who gives a fuck about indie developers though, right?

True, but pretty sure you still need to license the Nintendo SDK to make a game that Nintendo will accept officially, so they'll still get money off you.

You can use unofficial/open source SDKs for homebrew, though

Ah the SDK is free nvm

So someone forked the GitHub right?

Since there's now legal precedent, and GitHub already has the signatures of the project code, they will simply now close down any fork that matches the code signatures to avoid getting sued by Nintendo as well.

Hopefully someone forked it to a completely different self-hosted GitHub-like instance or the other GitHub alternatives.

There's no legal precedent, it was settled out of court

Court cases shouldn't be allowed to be settled out of court after a certain point.

Wym? Nintendo formerly filed the lawsuit just a few days ago and then Yuzu rolled right over...

I mean I get it, but if they had 2Mil to settle, they could have fought Nintendo, I know that 2 million wouldn't have seen them to the end, but im sure an organization like EFF could have assisted from there

The repository removal was voluntary and done by the Yuzu team. GitHub doesn't have to do anything and won't do anything. Even when they receive a DMCA takedown, they only block forks made through GitHub's "fork" button.

It wasn't voluntary, it was part of the settlement.

Voluntary from the perspective of GitHub. If it was through a DMCA request, all the forks would be gone with it.

Oh there will be forks across the git-verse. There's no way there wouldn't be.

Also does this create precedent? - they settled, its not like it actually went to court.

There isn't a legal precedent. Unless I misunderstood, this is a settlement and settlements aren't! Legal precedent. Which is why big e.g. pharma likes them, because then they don't have the legal precedent for the next case.

It would be possible to create a dummy "salt" commit and rebase every the branch onto it. The content would effectively be the same, but each commit hash would differ.

@0x0 Why do you think they only check the commit hash?

I don't? You can apply a similar technique to bust file hashes. Add a new comment to each source file, or whatever.

My point is that automated methods to detect unwanted content will only get GitHub so far. It will have to be fuzzy, and that means it's an arms race between detectors and obfuscators.

It would be better to "git clone" a repo under threat of removal than fork it in Github. That way an entire copy of its history is preserved. It's possible the forks still exist for now, even if Yuzu removes their official repo, but if Nintendo serves Github the legal paperwork then the forks will get blasted.

That said if someone clones the repo, they probably ought to think twice before putting it back in the cloud without sanitizing / reconstructing the branches & history absent of the bits that got Yuzu into trouble in the first place.

something something Streisand effect

Yup, the work of Yuzu isnt lost at all. It's just going to take time to see how that work will be advanced -- will Ryujinx absorb the developers and their knowledge or will Yuzu continue?

Yuzu’s unprecedented success was it’s downfall.

Their decision to profit off the project was their downfall.

It may have also been the fact that they linked to instruction on how to rip prod.keys and system firmwares. Also their instructions on enabling running copyrighted ROMs - despite the fact that Ripping game ROMs and firmware is not (unfortunately arguably, due to licencing models and jurisdiction - you will own nothing and like it.) illegal so long as it's for personal use.

They should've advertised it primarily as a testing and homebrew platform, and made sure not to make too much mention of the fact it can be used to play backups. Then they can at least play the ignorance card with more confidence.

Even then though, multi-billion yen company Nintendo probably would still pull this shit and drag, drag, drag the lawsuit out for forever and a day- draining lawyers fees of money. That being the case, settling is unfortunately the only option.

100% it's this. Also probably the fact that Nintendo is currently profiting off of switch. If it was after it became abandonware they probably wouldn't bother. You don't hear about Nintendo going after DS emulators.

You don’t hear about Nintendo going after DS emulators.

They do it all the time, with even older consoles. Nintendo doesn't give a shit.

I do wonder if this is specifically what got them, would probably take a lemmy lawyer to unpack it, but I would have to imagine if they didn't have a patreon and basically a company, it would have been much harder for Nintendo to do anything about them. And I would also imagine in retrospect whatever money they got was not worth it when it ends like this.

I always assume when people operate services like this, that they host it in a country like Russia that's less likely to care about takedowns by western corpos and done anonymously as possible. Even though it's just an emulator, you would think they wouldn't be so brazen as to have a patreon which I'm sure requires someone's identity/billing info. They probably still could have been tracked down if they took crypto donations or something like that, but you would think that would be the first choice over putting a giant target on their backs. Patreon is obviously just gonna hand over whatever info they are asked to give when served a warrent, and so is Discord for that matter if they had any personal info on there too.

Afaik what got them was providing fixes for an unreleased game behind a paywall. Hard to deny the piracy aspect when you are actively profiting off of it.

From the little I've read I think it's the patreon money, the support to make things work like keys etc, showing a list of working games, and generally being blatant about using it for playing pirated games in their official communication

Hopefully, it wasn't the success of Yuzu but the fact it was being developed by an established company which was accepting over $30,000/mo in donations for "internal" builds.

It's a lot easier to pressure a company that you know has a bunch of income, is firmly established in a country that recognises US copyright law, and makes a lot of money particularly on a legally contested technology.

They've gone after Dolphin before, but that's still up and going. If Ryujinx or some other Yuzu rewrite (a soft fork would be v easy to take down imo) goes down then I'll be proven wrong here

I think the difference with Dolphin is that it now emulates an extinct system(s), so it cannot possibly compete with the actual thing. They did have a close call last year, if I remember, and they pretty quickly went into "jettison all illegal shit out of the code base NOW." -mode.

Yeah, it's really not the same case for sure. I'm gonna see what happens to Ryujinx because that's the real test of whether Nintendo will let Switch emulation survive or not.

Here's a fork of Citra that can connect to the official nintendo network, still avilable now, by the person who made CTGP7 (custom tracks and characters in MarioKart 7), and here's the one for Yuzu. I think these are gonna be the main forks because they already have quite a lot of activity. It's cool that Citra and Yuzu were open-source so things like this can be made!

I hope the contributors are anonymous..

If they were anon, they wouldn't have folded. But the ethical thing to do now is for them to create new anon accounts, fork the repo, and keep doing the good work

I think at least for Yuzu it would be better for devs to rebrand it to keep ninty back a bit.

Where'd they get 2.3 million from?

Someone else mentioned in a comment that the LLC behind Yuzu may file for bankruptcy to avoid paying Nintendo anything

Tbh I think they were smart to incorporate. It might have drawn a larger target on their backs (though patreon's target probably dwarfed it), but it also meant that individually they were financially protected from Nintendo. They'll probably still have to pay Nintendo whatever their corporation currently has even if they declare bankruptcy, but at least the devs aren't having their wages garnished until the end of time.

If they do attempt to declare bankruptcy, let's hope Nintendo doesn't try and sue them again to pierce the corporate veil.

This is almost word for word what I said in another friend group today. Protecting individuals is literally why LLCs exist. It's what "LLC" stands for.

Nintendo Hyper Beam'd them into oblivion but they got a Substitute up first. The defense strategy was smart. The strategy that put them in the position of needing to use the defense strategy was idiotic, yes, but the defense was smart.

Short of Nintendo doing nothing at all, this is probably the best outcome that could have realistically happened.

Although it works out for these developers I hate that people can do this to avoid the full consequences of their actions.

I hate this too. But - what if we start using this ability to our advantage, just like these guys did? Corps use it, let’s also abuse it so they can’t destroy us without also waiving their rights. LLCs are the privacy abstraction layer of the real world. I figured that even registering your own personal domain is much safer when done through your own LLC than on your personal name. The examples are many.

Patreon?

Yuzu claims to have earned 30k from patreon, where they give their most recent builds with the most bug-fixes & optimizations.

The switch has been out for 7 years. Most they could've earned then would be 210k, and even doubling it wouldn't get close to 2 million

They've been earning 30k USD per month according to their patreon page. I've read in a comment that they've doubled their supporters at the time TOTK was leaked.

Interestingly 30k USD per month over 7 years is 2.5m USD, which is pretty close to the 2.3m USD settlement.

Assuming they didn't use a penny of those 30k and just kept it stored away in their "in case of Nintendo break glass" case

Likely not even close to that amount.

Wait I didn't get it yet.... Anyone theoretically know of another who knows another who may be able to send me a file related to or unrelated to the given subject?

The Internet Archive's got your back. As if you needed a reason to donate to them.

Does the archive have any links to roms? I think I got the emulator working but I don't know where to download anything to run on it. The only switch game I ever really wanted to play was breath of the wild anyway...

Botw runs better on cemu, the wiiu emulator.

Theoretically this exists: https://github.com/Nikilites/nuzu

Also, I managed to install the Flatpak of Yuzu off FlatHub about a half hour ago.

The release downloads work, but I don't expect a long future for that project. The creator publicly posted his country of residence on Reddit, and doesn't have much of a plan to avoid a lawsuit other than "we'll condemn piracy wherever we can."

On top of that, it has a brand-new Patreon and is missing the source code for core parts of the emulator.

Citra has a core on retroarch, I am hoping that it will stay up

My already-installed copy of these softwares won't go anywhere, Nintendo. Get bent.

More people would purchase the games if they weren't 60€ MSRP each regardless of size and quality.

I used to emulate switch games to test them as a free trial first, then I would buy them in second hand for half the price (which is still a lot, 30€ for a nintendo game versus 14€ for Nichijou volume)

And regardless of age! Their games never go on sale. And they don't use local pricing (the actual term escapes me rn), so us poors in the 3rd world are stuck paying half a months salary for 7 year old games 🤪

regional pricing is the phrase you are looking for friend!

This fiasco demonstrates why open source is the superior software model.

Running their mouths on Discord. Using Patreon to profit from (not) piracy (but everyone knows it is). Reckless display of hubris.

Does someone has the last release files? pls tell me someone has it

Citra (it's the main fork, still being updated now by the person who made), and Yuzu (Also seems to be active)

-- A wild Codeberg appeared. --

Codeberg is a collaboration platform providing Git hosting and services for free and open source software, content and projects.

Website: Codeberg.org

The organization selected the European Union for their headquarters and computer infrastructure, due to members' concerns that a software project repository hosted in the United States could be removed if a malicious actor made bad faith copyright claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Wikipedia: Codeberg e.V.

In June 2022 the Software Freedom Conservancy's "Give Up Github" campaign (in response to the GitHub Copilot licensing controversy) promoted Codeberg as an alternative to GitHub.

Conservancy: Give Up GitHub!

Quite reasonable. They don’t want to giveaway stuff free

I mean, you're right. I don't agree with the emulators being taken down, it sucks, but it's hardly surprising that Nintendo, a company known for strictly protecting their copyrights, would go after these projects.

Hopefully other people and projects can pick up the reins, but should always be ready and prepared for another strike like this.

Fuck shitendo. Their games are shit anyway. 🖕🏽

I guess that's why everyone wants to emulate them, because they suck so bad.

I don't. I never got the hype. Their games are trash. Their graphics on their switch are trash. Not sure what people like about Nintendo honestly.

Go play your Call of Doody, kid

Lmao. "kid". Thank you for making me feel young. Much appreciated. I never play COD, btw.