So, yet another emulator bites that Nintendo dust as the beloved family entertainment company drops the hammer on RYUJINX, but not in the usual “brimstone and Mario fire” way that has been the norm for years during takedowns. This comes after the earlier takedown of another popular Switch Emulator, Yuzu developed by Tropic Haze LLC, the same team that developed the Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra, the lawsuit which was then settled by the developers shelling out $2.4 million.
Nintendo vs Emulators
Nintendo has had quite a storied history dealing with gaming emulators. With the Dolphin Emulator, that ran Game Cube and Wii games, its use was circumvented just as it was set to be released on Steam on the basis that it bypassed most (if not all) of Nintendo’s anti-piracy protections at the time which enabled the violation of Nintendo’s intellectual property rights.
Tropical Haze LLC, a company that gave the world the 3DS and Switch emulators Citra (2014) and Yuzu (2018), were dealt quite the critical hit in March 2024 as the “Red Company” filed a lawsuit against the developers. The main focus was on Yuzu, which Nintendo claims was largely responsible for the mass piracy of one of their greatest Switch hits The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The Yuzu project was halted as part of the settlement mentioned earlier. Citra just happened to catch a stray bullet since it was developed by the same developers.
In its latest move in its “fight against piracy”, Ryujinx, an open-source Switch emulator developed by the Ryujinx team in 2018 that allows users to play Switch titles on multiple platforms has pulled its own source code from its GitHub and the whole project has been shut down. Instead of the usual filing of lawsuit that Nintendo is quite famous for, the company contacted the lead developer with an “offer.”
Yep! According to one of the other developers in a Discord post, Nintendo offered some form of agreement for the Ryujinx project to cease operation. It is unsure what the details of this offer was, but I suppose it was not a hard one to accept considering Nintendo supposedly managed to track the lead developer, gdkchan, to his location in Brazil. Supposedly, gdkchan could not be touched on a legal front due to Brazil being a ‘pro-emulator’ country. And its again supposedly not the first time Nintendo has taken this surveillance-and-visit approach to tackling emulation and piracy. View this story here.
As of now, the Ryujinx Github and download pages are empty and its Discord has halted of new members. And Ryujinx being the last of two great Switch emulators that have been available during the Switch’s life cycle till date, it seems there may not be another till the emergence of Nintendo’s newest hardware that the world is eagerly anticipating.
Nintendo vs The Masses
On a larger scale, most end users have one major problem with Nintendo despite all the love they have for the company and what it does: they won’t allow people to have a repository of classic games or past games of any kind. Not that the company has never made provisions such as the Virtual Console on Nintendo’s Wii and Wii U which allowed owners to own and play over 400 past games. But there is the general issue of “Nintendo giveth, Gamer payeth, and one day Nintendo taketh away.”
Nobody is really going to be pleased about having paid for something and no longer being able to access at some future point because the means by which it can be accessed has been Shut Down. Then it resurfaces on the next generation of console…and the gamer has to pay AGAIN?! This purchase and license issue is a whole other thing I would certainly like to tackle in another article once I’ve properly wrapped my head around it, but you get the picture.
People would like to KEEP and be able to ACCESS what they have PAID FOR FOREVER and not have to pay multiple times for the same thing they love in different generations. Even with the Wii U and 3DS, for now users can redownload purchased content. Emphasis on For Now, as seen in the Nintendo Notice of End of Purchase Page Q&A: “For the foreseeable future.” Well, perhaps they are planning a way to make all these and more possible in the future, which would probably be the only thing that may justify their clampdown on Emulators so hard this year.
Perhaps Nintendo may finally give a chunk of the masses exactly what they want when it comes to their games and the peoples’ money: the Freedom to Choose and Play as Paid for.
