A sad day for emulation and open source advocates, and a reminder that Nintendo can and will destroy you if they see fit.
Hopefully their works will live in the saved repos just as ReVanced was able to live on after YouTube shut the original project down.
Here’s a fork of Citra that can connect to the official nintendo network, still avilable now, by the person who made CTGP7 (custom tracks and characters in MarioKart 7), and here’s the one for Yuzu. I think these are gonna be the main forks because they already have quite a lot of activity. It’s cool that Citra and Yuzu were open-source so things like this can be made!
So someone forked the GitHub right?
Since there’s now legal precedent, and GitHub already has the signatures of the project code, they will simply now close down any fork that matches the code signatures to avoid getting sued by Nintendo as well.
Hopefully someone forked it to a completely different self-hosted GitHub-like instance or the other GitHub alternatives.
The repository removal was voluntary and done by the Yuzu team. GitHub doesn’t have to do anything and won’t do anything. Even when they receive a DMCA takedown, they only block forks made through GitHub’s “fork” button.
There’s no legal precedent, it was settled out of court
It’s a sad day. Fuck Nintendo.
Yuzu gave them the opening to sue though. If they had been more circumspect - “Oh this is to develop homebrew / indie games nudge nudge” then maybe Nintendo wouldn’t have unleashed the lawyers or done so ineffectively. After all it wouldn’t be Yuzu’s fault if some wicked website corrupted their pure intentions by releasing device keys or patches that allowed their emulator run commercial games. But they were more blatant than that.
Also from an empathic perspective, of course Nintendo were going to sue. Yuzu should have known they would since that’s what console platforms do when something interferes with their profits. Yuzu is doubly bad since it interferes with hardware sales and game sales unlike custom firmware / cartridges which only affect game sales.
Of course the genie is already out of the bottle. Yuzu’s source code and binaries were on github for anyone to clone / fork. All the games are out in the wild. The piracy will carry on. I think it’s fair to say the NSP is effectively dead as a platform at this point. If a NSP2 turns up this year, as rumored, then I expect it will have revised anti-piracy measures and potentially a heavy online service aspect to go with it - it’s far easier to detect pirates and wield the banhammer when a device is online.
Yuzu’s unprecedented success was it’s downfall.
Their decision to profit off the project was their downfall.
