Now to some degree I get it, the Switch is a current piece of hardware and Yuzu was being used to pirate various games by some users. Not only this but the Yuzu team had a patreon and were making some decent cash off the emulator which some theorize to be the big reason why the lawyers got involved and why, at least at time of writing, Ryujinx is still alive. There is also no denying that some people were using the emulator to pirate games, Nintendo are well within their rights to take this stuff down.
But there's a problem. The first problem is that while I can understand Nintendo taking umbridge with ROM and ISO sites, Emulators aren't JUST for piracy. For example I have a large collection of PS2 games that I bought back when I used to collect games extensively. My actual PS2 is being kept in a shoebox in the store room of my house right now so just being able to pop the disc copy of the game into my PC and play it via PCSX2 is an absolute godsend. Yuzu wasn't a piece of software made for piracy, no emulator is, they are made for convenience and preservation and Nintendo just decided to shit all over that for reasons I cannot comprehend
The other problem is that the Switch is a piece of fucking garbage. The controllers suck, the pro controllers are overpriced and the system can barely handle its own games. For example, the last big game I played on my Switch was Shin Megami Tensei 5, a game exclusive to the system AND YET suffered from massive frame drops when entering the fucking menu along with a bunch of other performance and visual hiccups. My joycons have suffered from drift and the system feels like shit to play in "portable" mode and looks like shit when its displayed on my TV. People who were using Yuzu to get a better resolution or not have their games run like trash don't deserve to be inconvenienced like this because of couple of fossilized scumfucks in Kyoto are mad they can't win a lawsuit against Palworld so they take it out on some emu devs.
I wrote a post about it previously before I had heard about any of this but emulation of systems and games is the single most important thing we have for preservation. Nintendo won't fucking do it, if anything they keep closing down stores and services so that tons of games become just flat out unobtainable and unplayable outside of emulation or overpaying for hardware and a used game that they don't make any money off. You can argue that maybe I'm overreacting a little because some other person will come along eventually and make a different Switch emulator in the future when its less relevant but the fact that a company is so willing to spit in the face of these efforts is just scummy and infuriating.
The funny part, the part that makes Nintendo seem a bit stupid and short sighted though, is that if you do a quick Google search for Yuzu or Citra, you will now find quite a large number of people flocking to uploads of the emulators in order to start using them (and probably pirating some games in the process) now that its ease of avaliability is dissapearing. I found a certain webpage that had Citra and Yuzu avaliable for downloads and between a bunch of comments saying simply "fuck Nintendo", there were some users saying "I had never heard of Yuzu before but after seeing the news I decided to download it and try it out". Does this count as the Streisand Effect?
Nintendo can throw their little tantrum and ruin a couple peoples lives, sure, but they aren't ever going to be able to stop the Emulation train. The more Nintendo do this kind of thing the more people will start to think that its morally acceptable to pirate their shit, and not just their old shit either. While they are probably a company that's too big to fail and have too many mindless fans that will give them millions of dollars for actual trash I can dream that one day all that good will will run dry and they will be forced to shutter their doors forever
Fuck Nintendo, haven't been good since the SNES
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