A lawsuit settlement with Nintendo is requiring the owners of the Switch emulator Yuzu to pay $2.4 million, hand over the domain to the company, and essentially delete everything they have in relation to their software. This settlement also includes the shutting down of the 3DS emulator, Citra. The below message was posted on X.
As the above message states, the big problem here seems to stem from the fact that Yuzu and Citra users were able to get ROMs for unreleased Nintendo games and leak content early. While the emulator itself doesn’t supply the ROMs, it allows people to pirate games, and that’s what drew Nintendo’s attention to it. One of the biggest issues Nintendo brought up in its lawsuit concerned The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom spoilers before the game launched last year. The code to download Yuzu and Citra has already been removed, with Patreon, Discord, and websites soon to be shut down.
Of course, lots of Yuzu and Citra users are not happy with this news. From a game preservation standpoint, this is a big blow to the Nintendo 3DS library, which had its eShop shut off last year. While it is feasible to see why a Switch emulator would be shut down so quickly, having an even harder time accessing digital-only games for the 3DS is a tough pill to swallow. There are a lot of games from that library that are impossible to play now, where you can at least still access everything on the Nintendo Switch.
With the domain being handed over to Nintendo, we have seen some people hope that the company would use that code to make some official emulators for 3DS and potentially Switch software in the future, but knowing how business works, all of that code is likely to rot away for a very long time.
