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.
has exactly the same performance but higher accuracy as yuzu from my experience (on amd gpus)
A much better protection is not to be in the US when it comes to copyright.
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.
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
“tech” YouTuber challenge of shutting the fuck up
Level: impossible
Yar
No. The dissemination of knowledge is important. No, don’t post direct links to obviously illegal material. But discussing piracy is critical to the system’s existence.
Besides, Yuzu was an emulator. Emulation is legal. We are totally right to discuss Yuzu. The emulator itself wasn’t what got them in trouble.
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
If you think Nintendo doesn’t employ people that know about emulators and piracy, then I hope the lord has mercy on your soul.
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
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.
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.
Good thing they won’t know emulators exist and obcess about it if nobody talks about it.
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.
I think the fundamental problem here is that we’re trying to point fingers at each other or situations instead of acknowledging that it’s not feasible to keep doing this in their domain no matter how much we try to make them happy. Instead of just going “oh we should’ve kept it secret” or “those users shouldn’t have done that” or “it was the NFTs!!1!!1!” and thinking that there was a way we could’ve gotten away with it, we should be encouraging doing this stuff in places where it’s harder if not impossible for them to win. Do what the crackers already did to become successful and free, and not pretend that there’s a way to get away with it in the western country that kisses up to companies.
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.
Fair question.id image there’s a certain draw towards the server hosting that’s outside of the law. any number of profitable businesses would benefit from such hosting.
Can we instead encourage people to post receipts with real game boxes and cartridges to enforce the idea that there are absolutely legitimate reasons to use emulators?
Pokemon in particular is the most emulatable series out there, between romhacks, randomizers, and upscalers on the 3D games.
There are definitely pirates, of course, but I feel like the public at large isn’t aware enough of the fact that emulation is often a good thing.