In a case for copyright law, Nintendo has secured a $2.4 million settlement from the developers of Yuzu (Tropic Haze), a popular Nintendo Switch emulator. Both companies had filed for a final judgment and permanent injunction on Monday.
The court document released reads:
“Plaintiff Nintendo of America Inc. (“Plaintiff” or “Nintendo”) and Tropic Haze LLC (“Defendant” or “Tropic Haze”), by and through their undersigned counsel, hereby consent to judgment in favor of Nintendo, and jointly move the Court to enter monetary relief in the sum of US$2,400,000.00 in favor of Nintendo and against Defendan
This resolution is a significant moment in the ongoing battle against game piracy.
Yuzu is an open-source project released in 2018 that allows users to play Nintendo Switch games on other common devices like phones and laptops. However, according to the court documents obtained, they had allegedly leaked copies of the Switch games earlier than was proposed. Nintendo claimed that more than a million people had gotten access to play the leaked copies on other platforms.
The lawsuit Nintendo filed, alleged that Yuzu’s developers bypassed the company’s security measures to create and distribute the emulator. This, the company argued, facilitated widespread piracy and significantly impacted their sales and brand.
As part of the settlement, the Yuzu team has agreed to cease all emulator-related activities and pay the hefty sum to Nintendo. Bunnei, who is the developer of the switch emulator, released a statement saying,
“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.”
