Running their mouths on Discord. Using Patreon to profit from (not) piracy (but everyone knows it is). Reckless display of hubris.
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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From what I have heard, they had a private Discord (this one maybe?) for Patreons where people shared pirated ROMs. Furthermore, they allegedly used binaries from Nintendo. In some places, this may not have be an issue. EU for example considers this software (binaries) to be the property of the customer if it is needed for the Switch to work as intended. Furthermore, EU makes exemptions for reverse-engineering for interoperability reasons, which Yuzu and any emulator surely do. I do not know what EU law says about distributing these binaries though. The point that I'm trying to make here is that the developers should have learned German and moved to Europe.
Probably the biggest issue was the piracy. I guess if they had not made piracy a part of their business, things would have turned out differently. I'm not making a moral argument for or against piracy, I'm just stating that it's difficult to make a business around it while being in the spotlight at the same time, as Yuzu was.
As an emulator, it's really a cool project and I hope it lives on and stays maintained somehow. I also think such work deserves to be compensated for.
Yuzu as a project never distributed any nintendo binaries for what I know (just info on how to extract binaries), but nintendo's vague nature was purposeful - If they said exactly what Yuzu did wrong, forks and competing projects (Ryujinx etc) would know how to avoid their wrath.
Maybe Nintendo knew about the discord and patreon, maybe not. We wont know what they disclosed (if anything) to pressure the studio into backing down almost immediately after seeking legal counsel, but being an american company making some kind of money from emulation made them easy pickings for Ninty
I dont know about a "private" Discord, but they have shut everything down.
Read their homepage.
-- A wild Codeberg appeared. --
Codeberg is a collaboration platform providing Git hosting and services for free and open source software, content and projects.
The organization selected the European Union for their headquarters and computer infrastructure, due to members' concerns that a software project repository hosted in the United States could be removed if a malicious actor made bad faith copyright claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
In June 2022 the Software Freedom Conservancy's "Give Up Github" campaign (in response to the GitHub Copilot licensing controversy) promoted Codeberg as an alternative to GitHub.