With Yuzu agreeing to pay Nintendo a $2.4 million settlement, the Switch emulator’s future looks bleak

A new court filing says that the developers behind the popular Switch emulator Yuzu have agreed to pay a $2.4 million settlement to Nintendo, and the not-yet-official final judgment suggests that the software itself is not long for this world.

In a joint filing published today, Nintendo of America and Tropic Haze LLC – the company behind Yuzu – now “consent to judgment in favor of Nintendo, and jointly move the Court to enter monetary relief in the sum of $2,400,000.00 in favor of Nintendo and against defendant.”

The proposed final judgment and permanent injunction would have the Yuzu devs permanently barred from “offering to the public, providing, marketing, advertising, promoting, selling, testing, hosting, cloning, distributing, or otherwise trafficking in Yuzu or any source code or features of Yuzu.” The terms would also have the Yuzu website shut down, and would have the devs turn over any “physical circumvention devices” or modified Switch consoles to Nintendo itself.

That judgment has, again, not yet been made final, but given the the filing was made jointly between lawyers representing Nintendo and Tropic Haze, it’s safe to say that the future for Yuzu does not look bright.

Emulation itself is not illegal – in fact, you can argue that the Switch itself is a massive emulator by Nintendo’s own design. Nintendo’s suit against Yuzu instead argued that the emulator illegally circumvents the Switch’s game encryption keys, and that the emulator helped promote 1 million illegal downloads of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom before launch.

All this is awaiting a judge’s go-ahead, but notably, this settlement would keep the case from being vigorously tested in court. In the US, there hasn’t been a large-scale trial for an emulator since Bleem, a PlayStation emulator that was sold in stores while the PS1 was still on the market. Sony sued the makers of Bleem, but the emulator devs won that lawsuit, setting the precedent that emulation software is legal to develop and sell.

This Yuzu settlement would not change that precedent. While this is all very bad news for Yuzu and its developers, emulation – especially when it comes to emulators that don’t include ways to circumvent copy protection – is likely to continue without much issue.

Nintendo threw quite a fit when the Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom leaks hit last year.