Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu will utterly fold and pay $2.4M to settle its lawsuit

According to a joint filing, Tropic Haze has not only agreed to pay $2,400,000 to Nintendo but also says Yuzu is “primarily designed to circumvent and play Nintendo Switch games.” The company agrees to be permanently enjoined from working on Yuzu, hosting Yuzu, distributing Yuzu’s code or features, hosting websites and social media that promote Yuzu, or doing anything else that circumvents Nintendo’s copyright protection.

Oh, and it will surrender the yuzu-emu.org domain name to Nintendo, agree to delete not only its copies of Yuzu but also “all circumvention tools used for developing or using Yuzu—such as TegraRcmGUI, Hekate, Atmosphère, Lockpick_RCM, NDDumpTool, nxDumpFuse, and TegraExplorer,” and hand over any “physical circumvention devices” and “modified Nintendo hardware” to Nintendo. It also agrees to not delete any other “evidence” that infringes Nintendo’s IP rights.

You can read through the entirety of the proposed final judgment and permanent injunction at the bottom of this story; they have not yet been approved by a judge.

Yuzu has still not publicly commented on the lawsuit at its website, Patreon, or Discord — though a bot is still replying to some Discord users with the following message: “yuzu is legal, we don’t support illegal activities. Dumping your purchased games and system files from your Switch is legal. Downloading them is not.”

It’s not yet clear if this is the end of Yuzu, since copies of both the emulator and its source code are in the wild. Some online supporters specifically mentioned backing up the code after Nintendo sued two weeks ago.

I’m also not clear on whether this result could impact other emulators. If Yuzu had fought this lawsuit in court, one of the biggest questions would have been whether Yuzu is actually circumventing Nintendo’s protections since the emulator itself does not contain Nintendo’s keys. (Yuzu is a “bring-your-own-BIOS” emulator.) But now, Nintendo and Tropic Haze are asking a judge to specifically find that Yuzu circumvents its copyright protections by using those keys, even if it doesn’t come with them.

They are asking a federal judge to say yes to this, specifically:

Developing or distributing software, including Yuzu, that in its ordinary course functions only when cryptographic keys are integrated without authorization, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on trafficking in devices that circumvent effective technological measures, because the software is primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing technological measures.

I guess we’ll see if the judge does so!