Nintendo continues to crack down hard on emulators

Another day, another Nintendo emulator gone forever. Ryujinx is the latest Nintendo Switch emulator to cease to exist, after the founder was apparently being contacted by Nintendo with an offer that would see the emulator shut down for good and its assets removed.

Emulators have always been a complex area. The software enables you to play games designed for consoles on a PC or a smartphone. It’s possible to emulate games from ROMs that you rip from your own physical games, but you can also download those ROMs illegally. Emulators themselves aren’t illegal necessarily, but using them to play pirated games usually is.

Nintendo has a long history of aggressively defending its intellectual property rights, with other emulators being forced to shut down. It’s not just emulation that gets under Nintendo’s skin, either, with Nintendo bringing a lawsuit against the makers of the game Palworld for infringing a patent relating to Nintendo’s Pokemon games.

Nintendo is a huge company, and one that has a loyal and devoted following (me included). However, it does increasingly feel like, far from being a company that brings joy through its games, it’s becoming one that brings the angry wrath of Bowser down on anyone who threatens it.

Switch emulator Ryujinx appears to be gone for good

The app is no longer available for download

The popular Nintendo Switch emulator Ryujinx has been pulled from its own website and removed from GitHub. There’s no official information on the Ryujinx website at the time of writing, but a message on the Ryujinx Discord appears to give an explanation for the missing software.

A post from user rip in peri peri, which was also posted by the Ryujinx account on X, states that gdkchan, the creator of the emulator, was contacted directly by Nintendo. The post claims that the company offered gdkchan an agreement to stop working on the emulator and remove all related assets. There’s been no direct confirmation from gdkchan as to whether this agreement was accepted, but the empty download page on the Ryujinx website would appear to indicate that it was.

Some on social media are speculating that the phrasing of the post stating that gdkchan was offered an agreement indicates that he took a payment from Nintendo in exchange for removing the emulator. However, based on Nintendo’s past and recent history, this seems incredibly unlikely. It’s probably more the case that gdkchan was offered a reduced settlement on the amount of money that he would owe to Nintendo, with companies and individuals who have previously fallen foul of Nintendo often being forced to pay millions of dollars in restitution.

The Yuzu emulator faced a similar fate

Yuzu was forced to pay a huge settlement

Yuzu

One such example comes from earlier this year. Yuzu was another popular Switch emulator, until Nintendo accused Yuzu of “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale.” Nintendo’s lawyers sought not only to stop Yuzu from operating, but also to hand over its entire website including the rights to the domain name, and even to destroy its hard drives to remove the emulator from existence.

For a while, it seemed like Yuzu was willing to fight, with the company bringing a lawyer on board, but in March this year, a settlement was reached, with Yuzu agreeing to shut down, cease distribution of the emulator, and pay $2.4 million in damages to Nintendo. The settlement also includes a permanent injunction, meaning that Yuzu will not be coming back in any form in the future.

Nintendo effectively destroyed Yuzu through the courts and got a significant chunk of money out of the bargain, too. If it was intended to be a warning, Ryujinx didn’t listen, and it now seems highly likely that Ryujinx will be faced with paying a similar level of monetary relief to Nintendo.

Individuals aren’t immune to Nintendo’s wrath

Aptly named Gary Bowser will be paying Nintendo for the rest of his life

Lego

It’s important to remember that Yuzu and Ryujinx weren’t big corporations with bottomless pockets and a team of lawyers on retainer. These were tiny companies made up of small teams of developers who were working in their free time on something that they felt passionate about. Nintendo is willing to go even smaller, however, and take on individuals.

Consider the case of Gary Bowser, a man whose name would be funny if his life wasn’t now ruined by going up against Nintendo. To be clear, Bowser (not that one, or that one) pleaded guilty to conspiracy to circumvent technological measures and traffic in circumvention devices, alongside other members of the Team-Xecuter hacking group. He was involved in selling devices that could bypass security measures and let users play illegal ROMs on their devices for free without needing to buy the real games.

Bowser was clearly making money at Nintendo’s expense, but alongside serving 14 months of his 40-month sentence, Bowser is still slowly paying off the $14.5m in damages that he was also ordered to pay. He has to give Nintendo up to 30% of any money left over after necessities such as rent and food, and will continue to do so for the rest of his life, since he will never earn enough to pay off the full extent of the damages.

Bowser was engaged in criminal activity, and did plead guilty, but according to Bowser in an interview with the Guardian after his release, he didn’t make the products or sell them directly; his job was to update the websites with the latest products and keep users informed of upcoming developments. Nintendo clearly wanted to make a statement, however, and Bowser was left with jail time and a huge fine.

Emulators that run Nintendo games do still exist

Delta has so far appeared to dodge Nintendo’s ire

What does Nintendo’s heavy-handed approach to emulation mean for the future? There are still plenty of emulators out there that are able to play Nintendo games. The Delta emulator, for example, became the first emulator that Apple approved for the iPhone, and in its current form it is capable of playing games from a number of Nintendo consoles, including the NES, SNES, N64, GBA, and Nintendo DS.

Emulation is a legal gray area. The software itself isn’t illegal, unless its breaking proprietary encryption. However, using an emulator to play ROMs that are obtained illegally is against copyright law. If you own a game and extract the ROM yourself, no harm done, but if you download it from a website, then you’re in dangerous territory.

So far, Nintendo doesn’t appear to have made any approaches to Delta about shutting down its emulation of Nintendo games. This may be because the Delta emulator is only able to emulate games from older systems, whereas Yuzu and Ryujinx were emulating games from the current Nintendo Switch console, which could have a negative impact on the sales of current games.

It may be the case that Nintendo is willing to turn a blind eye to emulation of older games in a way that it’s not willing to do with current Switch games. Based on its history, however, Nintendo has never considered emulators to be doing anything other than legitimizing piracy, so you may be wise to enjoy the current Nintendo emulators while you can.

It’s not just emulators that Nintendo doesn’t like

Palworld shows that Nintendo won’t let anyone step on its toes

Palworld

The similarities between the game Palworld, developed by Pocketpair, and Nintendo’s own Pokemon games are clear to see. The game includes the action of throwing a sphere at monsters in order to capture them (sound familiar?) and many of the monsters in the game bear a striking resemblance to characters in the Pokemon franchise. Nintendo considers Palworld to be too similar, however, and has filed a legal case against Pocketpair for infringing Nintendo’s patent rights relating to the Pokemon games.

This wouldn’t be the first time that one game has borrowed heavily from another, however. There are entire genres of games named after the game they borrow heavily from, such as Roguelike and Soulslike, that make no attempt to hide their inspiration. These games often improve upon the original, and while Palworld may not be better than Pokemon, it’s not impossible that a developer could create a game with a similar mechanic that improves upon the series. Unfortunately, thanks to Nintendo, we’re unlikely to ever find out.

Nintendo has the right to protect its interests

They don’t always align with user interests, however

Nintendo

Nintendo is a business, and it has a right to protect that business. If people are making money selling devices that allow users to play Switch games without having to pay for them, then not only is Nintendo losing money, but others are making money from its intellectual property. Nintendo is absolutely within its rights to take legal action.

However, when it comes to emulation, things aren’t quite so clear-cut. In a world of digital games and consoles that sell without disc drives, the concept of owning games is becoming ever more blurred. Emulation allows users who have bought games to back them up and continue to play them, even when the hardware they were designed for is no longer available to purchase, extending the life of those games.

It’s also the case that emulation can give users a better experience than is possible through legitimate means. Before it was shut down, users were able to play The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom on the Ryujinx emulator at more than 120 frames per second, significantly higher than is possible on the current Nintendo Switch consoles.

Nintendo looks like it will continue to rule with an iron fist when it comes to emulation. There’s a clear mismatch between the resources of a major corporation and a small group of volunteer developers, meaning that Nintendo will always have more money available for prolonged legal battles. Ultimately, the little guy will invariably have no choice but to give in to Mega Mario’s demands or face being stomped.

Nintendo Switch

Nintendo once again changed the gaming landscape with a console that you could take on the go. It may not have the power of some consoles, but it sure is fun.