Trust me, they can easily find out about all emulators that exist. All that matters is if they see some advantage in shutting the project down.
I’m pretty sure that someone, somewhere inside Nintendo will have a Google Alert setup.
There are three issues here:
- The leaked ROM of Tears of the Kingdom and a .nfo that specifically told people to use Yuzu
- The developers recently released an Android version that works really, really well. There are many Android based gaming handhelds on the market now, and several are powerful enough to run Switch games using Native Code Execution (think virtual machine for ARM). Switch emulation was being used as a benchmark in techie videos of these products! TotK still isn’t great on the most powerful ones, but give it another year or two, and you’ll get the full Switch experience without a Switch.
- The developers fucking sold the emulator. Sure, it was only for early access, but a sale is a sale. Then there the whole patreon thing.
Those three things combined put Yuzu right in Nintendo’s sights
Can we all just shut up about pirating things as a rule of thumb? Like, just shut the fuck up and play your free game
Agreed. But in this case, yuzu is literaly the first result for “switch emulator” so nindento could probably find it on their own
The problem is that they provided instructions on their official site on how to dump encryption keys. That’s just dumb. Let the community supplement that info and just provide the emulator and play dumb.
Lol! I did not know that. Sharing keys for a piece of hardware that’s still in production is bold
They didn’t share keys, they shared instructions on how to dump them. But it’s still dumb, just don’t raise any flags if you’re trying to run a for profit company.
“tech” YouTuber challenge of shutting the fuck up
Level: impossible
This biggest game launch in years got leaked online, and the discord for yuzu got 50k new users at the same time all asking for the game pre release.
Yuzu even got featured on the steam deck promotional material briefly.
I don’t think Nintendo would just sit back on that. The horse was out of the barn and between steam deck and totk Nintendo was never going to sit idly by.
I mean they were doomed when they started asking for money in addition to pointing people how to break encryption and stuff so you can play those definitely your copies of TotK that was leaked
No, money is not a problem, bleem was a commercial product, there are other paid emulators like PPSSPP.
Money is not what makes it legal/illegal. But asking for money is definitely poking the hornet’s nest.
Well, Bleem went down under the weight of Sony’s lawsuits, just like Yuzu did with Nintendo’s. Sony didn’t even win any of their lawsuites against Bleem in the end, but constant legal trouble is usually too much for small startups to handle. The US’s legal system essentially allows any company to duel any other, with legal funds as the weapon of choice, and the bigger weapon wins every time. Legality doesn’t matter unless both companies can truly afford to fight the battle to the end, and emulators will likely never have that power. So all we can do as consumers looking for options is to try not to talk about the little guys so much that one of the big guys feels it’s necessary to bury them to death with lawsuits.
Not just that, but their website included instructions on how to dump encryption keys. Reverse engineering a console is perfectly legal and Nintendo has historically left emulators alone, but all the other emulator developers were smart enough to advertise that their emulator was for homebrew purposes only and remove any talk of privacy from their forums. All that information is easily supplemented by the community so including it on your official site is just plain stupid. Emulator development needs to be centralized so you need to play dumb. The illegal stuff can go to side communities where they have to play whack a mole. Yuzu folded without putting up a fight because they know they fucked up.
I’m pretty sure there’s someone, somewhere at Nintendo who knows how google works. I would be shocked if they don’t know more about Switch emulators than I do, and Yuzu wasn’t even my first choice. Yuzu didn’t get sued because it’s popular. They got sued because they ran a profitable company in a country that enforces IP laws pretty strictly and tends to side with large corporations over people.
Let’s say, hypothetically, that I’m not a Nintendo spy. Let’s also say that, still hypothetically, I would be interested in, or curious about, maybe, what would have been your first choice. Would you hypothetically tell it to me?
Not talking about pirating anything, btw. Just making hypotheses about a purely imaginary scenario.
Yes. Yes I would. In this purely hypothetical situation I would tell you that I prefer Ryujinx. It doesn’t perform quite as well, so it’s not great if you’re on a Steam Deck or something like it, but in my experience it tends to be less buggy, and it’s also run like an actual open source project.
You know, hypothetically.
emulators and modders running patreons and paywalling releases is truly the dumbest possible thing to do
A small Patreon to cover expenses isn’t so bad. Paywalling releases and running a $30,000/month Patreon out of a company in Rhode Island was not a smart plan.
has exactly the same performance but higher accuracy as yuzu from my experience (on amd gpus)
It’s about the CPU, I could play Zelda on Yuzu with my 3200G, but on Ryujinx the game is almost on slow motion.
Good thing they won’t know emulators exist and obcess about it if nobody talks about it.
A much better protection is not to be in the US when it comes to copyright.
Or Japan for that matter
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/hqwP6uuYOWo?si=409x_D-khiyjC3G-
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Sorry, do you think multibillion dollar game corporations don’t employee people who enjoy playing games? People who pursue it as a hobby and run across the same fuckin piracy tools you run across?
They know.
Yeah but I doubt it’s the developers going after emulators like this. It’s the higher ups and legal teams I imagine.
Likely. The cause against Yuzu came now in light of the imminent annoincement of Switch 2.
If you think Nintendo doesn’t employ people that know about emulators and piracy, then I hope the lord has mercy on your soul.
THEY WILL FIND OUT it doesn’t matter it will show up in a Google Alert someday.
The right solution is to not buy anything from Nintendo.
In my experience, practically none of the people who care about Nintendo suing Yuzu were buying Nintendo games anyways.
So they’re not losing any sales if those people boycott buying their games. But on the other side, they probably weren’t losing any significant percentage of sales to Yuzu either.
I’ve bought several nintendo games, mostly for switches that haven’t been in my ownership, but borrowed or similar or just for older devices
but you’re right in that their sales loss is probably quite insignificant, as well as any boycott
A greater flex to pirating Nintendo games is not pirating Nintendo games. There are some pretty decent alternatives to most genres. Indie alternatives, even.
We all have beloved IPs. It was soul crushing to see Star Wars fall to Disney and EA. But we can and do move on.
Let Nintendo know they do not own consummership. At least not yours.
The Switch library sucks anyway. Besides Mario Kart and Smash Bros, I’ve been disappointed with every single 1st party title released on this underpowered POS. Especially Tears of the Kingdom. The game is just a repeat of BotW, which is just a watered down Minecraft clone with the Zelda logo slapped on top. It’s an insult to Zelda fans.
Arguing that BotW is a clone of Minecraft fundamentally misunderstands the distinctive design philosophies, gameplay mechanics, narrative structures, and overall objectives that separate these two games. At their core, Minecraft is a sandbox game focused on creativity, building, and exploration within a procedurally generated world, emphasizing player freedom and creativity without predefined goals. In stark contrast, BotW is a meticulously crafted action-adventure game set in a fixed, hand-designed world that prioritizes exploration, puzzle-solving, and combat within a rich narrative framework. Unlike Minecraft’s open-ended gameplay, BotW unfolds within the established Legend of Zelda universe, featuring a deep narrative, complex characters, and a clear objective: to defeat Ganon and save Princess Zelda.
BotW’s sophisticated combat mechanics, strategic use of weapons and abilities, and environmental puzzles offer a gameplay experience vastly different from Minecraft’s straightforward combat and focus on building. The exploration in BotW is guided, enriched with side quests and story-driven objectives, contrasting with Minecraft’s emphasis on randomness and player creativity. Additionally, BotW’s unique, cel-shaded art style and its innovations in game design, such as physics-based puzzle solving and dynamic weather, showcase Nintendo’s commitment to revitalizing the open-world genre, setting it apart from Minecraft’s blocky, pixelated aesthetic.
While there are superficial similarities in open-world exploration and resource gathering, BotW and Minecraft cater to vastly different gaming experiences. BotW is not a Minecraft clone but a standout title in the action-adventure genre, leveraging the Zelda franchise’s rich history to introduce innovative gameplay mechanics that distinguish it from not only Minecraft but other games within its genre.
odyseey
splatoon 2 and splaton 3
smm2
mario wonder
kirby forgotten land
Etc
SM 64 & Sunshine were better
Not interested in Splatoon
Don’t know what “smm2” is
Not into side scrolling Mario games (besides the classics)
Too easy, therefore not fun. Also they removed combining abilities which is bullshit. Kirby 64 is better.
Smm2 = super mario maker 2
Any ways that doesnt make the switch library suck your either very nostolgiapilled and everythingnewsuckspilled or they just arent your kind of games
Nintendo doesn’t care. They stay in their lane and they are strategic about each move.
I remember hearing about pretty terrible corporate culture as they demand obedience and swear you to secrecy. I think I remember some guy mentioned he worked at Nintendo on a podcast and they instantly fired him to make a point.
What Nintendo does care about is knockoffs. At their core they are toymakers who make collectibles. What is a knockoff? Anything that Nintendo deems so.
That’s a concavebrain take, they likely know about emulators long before the average consumer.
Emulation makers need to move to non extradition countries and improve their op-sec
I wonder if that trend is affecting server hosting prices and availability.
Gto here with your WWII propaganda slogans
For further context the phrase was largely leveraged to stop the spread of bad news on the war front. They were fairly confident that a German spy network didn’t exist within American society at the time of the campaign, but didn’t want negative press to circulate about the war effort.
This is such a load of shit, companies always know about hacked products long before they become popular.
If devs really wanted this to not happen they’d be doing it how every successful cracker does, by operating in a C.I.S. state and keeping themselves safe, not by clutching their pearls about people pirating games and being assholes to their only real users.
They may or may not know about them, but when someone higher up gets embarrassed, such as TOTK being streamed before launch, that creates a lot of pressure to act
Companies aren’t people either. Did someone at Nintendo know about this? Undoubtedly. I’m sure plenty of them did, they’re a big company and emulators for their old content are like the #1 gaming emulators.
Their lawyers and leadership may have known in a vague sense, but they’re probably not technical. Something got them in a room together to see if they could do something about this… It wasn’t because they lost money (I doubt they did), it was because they looked bad in front of shareholders
I’ll preface this by saying fuck Nintendo, this is really bad precedent and I’m so pissed this went through. The judgement against them was seriously insane… They built a tool that was legal (at least before now), and were fined $1.6 million, had to give up everything with the name yuzu, had to give up all of their personal Nintendo products, and there were a few other things… It’s truly insane IP is being protected to this extent.
But conversely, people were way too public with the TOTK leak. Teach your friends and family how to sail the high seas, talk about it in niche corners, drop theoretical knowledge on strangers in quiet corners of the web.
The high seas are an open secret… It’s fine if most everyone uses it, especially when companies make their own products uncompetitive with the hassle of alternative means. But, we have to pretend in public, at least a little
If it’s out in the open, someone is going to push IP law even further. Not for moral or profit reasons, purely because a win will make them look strong and an embarrassment makes them look weak.
And that makes stock prices dance for a bit.
