The Yuzu dev team has decided to end the project, marking the end of a great Nintendo Switch emulator.
In the end, Nintendo won: After suing the creators of Yuzu, the developers decided to shut down the project and pay Nintendo $2.4 million in damages.
In detail, this means that Tropic Haze, the company responsible for the Yuzu emulator, has agreed to stop working on Yuzu, stop hosting the emulator, and end the distribution of code or features. They are also surrendering the yuzu-emu.org domain to Nintendo.
It also looks like this is the end of the 3DS emulator Citra, as the GitHub page hosting the source code now forwards to a 404 error page.
On Discord, developer Tropic Haze Bunnei confirmed the news:
Hello yuz-ers and Citra fans: We write today to inform you that yuzu and yuzu’s support of Citra are being discontinued, effective immediately.
yuzu and its team have always been against piracy. We started the projects in good faith, out of passion for Nintendo and its consoles and games, and were not intending to cause harm. But we see now that because our projects can circumvent Nintendo’s technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy. In particular, we have been deeply disappointed when users have used our software to leak game content prior to its release and ruin the experience for legitimate purchasers and fans.
We have come to the decision that we cannot continue to allow this to occur. Piracy was never our intention, and we believe that piracy of video games and on video game consoles should end. Effective today, we will be pulling our code repositories offline, discontinuing our Patreon accounts and Discord servers, and, soon, shutting down our websites. We hope our actions will be a small step toward ending piracy of all creators’ works.
Thank you for your years of support and for understanding our decision.
So far, it remains unknown what the repercussions on the general emulation scene will be. For one, even if Nintendo ordered Tropic Haze to delete all Yuzu sources, the community probably still has the complete source code. So it might just be a matter of time before someone brave comes up with their version of Yuzu (UPDATE: that happened, it's called Suyu).
It is also unclear if, following this action, other companies will now go against more emulators upon seeing Nintendo's success – and if, thus, emulation will turn into an even more niche thing. The first consequences I saw were the Steam Deck Discord, disallowing any talk about emulation, and EmuDeck completely removing any mentions of Yuzu from the tool.
