Nintendo may have just won its battle to put the most popular Nintendo Switch emulators out of business. In March, it sued Yuzu out of existence — and now it may have convinced Yuzu’s primary competitor, Ryujinx, to go away too.
“Yesterday, gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and offered an agreement to stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets he’s in control of,” writes developer and moderator ripinperiperi on Discord. “While awaiting confirmation on whether he would take this agreement, the organization has been removed, so I think it’s safe to say what the outcome is.”
The rest of ripinperiperi’s message is a eulogy for the project, including a pair of videos showing the Ryujinx team’s progress on iOS and Android ports of the Nintendo Switch emulator, among other core changes — ones that will now presumably never ship.
Nintendo would not confirm or deny to The Verge that it made a deal with the developer. Instead, Nintendo spokesperson Eddie Garcia mysteriously pointed me to the Entertainment Software Association’s head of public affairs Aubrey Quinn — who said she couldn’t speak on behalf of Nintendo. I guess I got the runaround.
Compared to Yuzu, Ryujinx was thought to be relatively untouchable. Rumor had it that lead developer GDKChan was based in emulation-friendly Brazil, though I never found proof of that when reporting on the plight of the emulator world earlier this year. Certainly, we never heard about a lawsuit against Ryujinx, nor did Nintendo go after its Discord server or DMCA its GitHub as we saw with other Switch emulators. (GitHub does currently not show a DMCA takedown request for Ryujinx, by the way.)
While emulators are technically legal in a broad sense, there’s nothing preventing Nintendo from filing lawsuits that indie developers cannot afford to fight, filing DMCA takedown requests, or simply putting pressure on organizations like Discord and GitHub to pull things down themselves.
There are even legal theories that suggest Nintendo could win a case if it went to court — not because emulators are illegal, but because of the other copy protection mechanisms in the Switch and the argument that some of these modern emulators are trafficking in piracy.
It also seems like Nintendo may be back on the legal beat in general: this weekend, popular YouTuber RetroGameCorps announced that Nintendo has filed enough copyright strikes — just for showing Nintendo games like Zelda Wind Waker HD running on various hardware in his videos — that his entire YouTube channel is at risk of deletion. As a result, he says he won’t show Nintendo games anymore.
While it seems likely that this is the end of the official Ryujinx team, several members of whom are saying goodbye in its Discord, it’s possible it’s not quite over. Sometimes, a coup can wrest control of a distributed developer group like this; we haven’t heard from GDKChan yet. It’s also possible that, like with Yuzu, forks of Ryujinx will spread across GitHub and across the web at large, or that their code will become the basis of future emulators.