Nintendo takes Switch emulator Yuzu to court in major lawsuit, alleging it fueled 1 million illegal downloads of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom before release

28.02.2024 - 00:23 / gamesradar.com / Stephen Totilo / Austin Wood / Nintendo

Prolific Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu is the latest to receive a lawsuit from Nintendo, and it's a big one. The house of Mario alleges that the program fueled a rush that saw The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom illegally downloaded over 1 million times before the game was properly released, and that's just one item on Nintendo's laundry list of alleged damages, which collectively take aim at a major emulator in a way that's rarely seen, even from such a famously litigious company, drawing many comparisons to Sony's lawsuit against Bleem. 

In a complaint filed in Rhode Island on February 26 (available online, and partially shared by reporter Stephen Totilo), Nintendo alleges that Yuzu operator Tropic Haze has dealt it "irreparable" harm by providing "any Internet user in the world with the means to unlawfully decrypt and play virtually any Nintendo Switch game – including Nintendo’s current generation and most popular games – without ever paying a dime for a Nintendo console or for that game." 

Tears of the Kingdom is just one high-profile example. Nintendo says the game leaked over a week ahead of its official release, and claims it saw more than 1 million illegal downloads during that small window – during which time, Patreon support for Yuzu reportedly "doubled." You wouldn't actually download the game through Yuzu, which is why this evidence comes across circumstantial at best, but Nintendo's singled it out as the element enabling illegal copies to be played. Nintendo argues that "thousands of additional paid members of Yuzu’s Patreon signed up so that they could download the early access build and play unlawful copies" of Tears of the Kingdom. 

It blames Yuzu developers for enabling this alleged piracy, and likewise calls out the emulator's official Discord for having "implemented a ban on discussing Zelda: TotK emulation in Yuzu’s Discord server because so many Yuzu users were trying to seek support emulating it."

Yuzu project lead Bunnei is named several times in the complaint, which feels especially relevant since Bunnei has publicly dismissed legal issues around emulation in the past. Speaking with PC Gamer on the heels of Tears of the Kingdom's leak and release, in a quote that Nintendo actually skewers in its complaint as evidence that Yuzu devs were aware of things like the Tears of the Kingdom pirate gold rush, Bunnei said:

"We only begin working on emulating new titles once we can legally acquire and dump them ourselves. Since Nintendo Switch releases are region-based, we become legally able to work on them as soon as the title becomes available somewhere in the world. Most issues with TotK in Yuzu (thus far) have been fixed with minor changes that were quick to debug and easy to