Just last week, on Tuesday, February 26th, 2024, news broke out about the Yuzu emulator team being sued by none other than Nintendo themselves, with Nintendo claiming that the emulator apparently allowed users to play certain games early (due to street dates being broken) and also allowing...
  • f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1441·
    9 months ago

    Yuzu fucked up. This is about more than the decryption. Yuzu’s actions (copypasta from a fine redditor):

    • Massive patreon, to the point it has an LLC set to manage the money flow
    • Early access releases are effectively SOLD, they fucked around with manifest/build files, abused GPL to go after some forks back when they were Citra, attacked other forks/emulators then benefitted from their work and even replicated their practices (like CEMU’s patreon), etc
    • Actively targets Switch competitors (Steam Deck, Android), to the point Valve once included it in a marketing reel
    • Its presence on the OFFICIAL Android play store rather than an apk competes with Nintendo’s own Android games (undermining both those and the Switch)
    • Unauthorized use of Nintendo imagery
    • Extensive telemetry, itself juicy data that could be sold for advertisers, on top of Nintendo’s own built-in telemetry that’s also sent
    • Patreon marketing is heavily focused on games that broke street day release date, and even when they show some “restraint” it’s just a release day post how much better the game runs on a platform that’s not the Nintendo Switch, in the same launch period where most sales happen
    • Progress reports timed suspiciously close to major Nintendo first-party releases
    • ATTEMPTED to make a competitor to the Switch Online service, using files from an external preservation group, and it would have been a PAID service, and the subscription MORE EXPENSIVE than Nintendo’s actual service (it was $60 something) despite smaller compatibility, for games still online, as a CLOSED-SOURCE FORK of a GPL PROJECT so that players don’t actually set up their own custom servers to avoid paying Yuzu’s pittance. When there was backlash, they REMOVED all traces of online emulation after they couldn’t profit off it.
    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      421·
      9 months ago

      Yeah their problem was to make it a commercial operation. At that point it’s trivial for Nintendo to show they’ve enriched themselves on the back of ripped ROMs by enabling them.

      Whereas if you do everything for free and don’t even accept donations, they’d have a big problem showing that you have any commercial interest and hence can be sued for damages.

      • trafficnab@lemmy.caEnglish
        3·
        9 months ago

        Reverse engineering software (and even using small bits of proprietary code when required) in order to make it compatible with other hardware is fully legal (tons of precedent, for emulation specifically see Sega v Accolade and Sony v Connectix), and selling emulators commercially is also fully legal (Sega v Connectix was about a commercial Playstation emulator for the Mac, Sony v Bleem was about a commercial emulator for the PC and Dreamcast)

        Nintendo’s legal claims against Yuzu are completely untested and dubious at best, it’s the threat of spending millions of dollars on lawyers that’s very real and effective, they are yet again simply weaponizing the courts and the DMCA like all the other corpo scum before them

      • madcaesar@lemmy.worldEnglish
        42·
        9 months ago

        The problem is that this shit is a lot of work that we all benefit from… So how do we compensate the devs?

        • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
          111·
          9 months ago

          That’s the neat part, you don’t.

          Same as any other type of internet piracy. I don’t give money to some guy ripping his movies or games.

          The only way to do things like this is anonymously for the shits and giggles. A Patreon to make it their job is one thing, but the fact that they can pay $2.4million shows it went beyond that.

          • Psychodelic@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            9 months ago

            Yeah fuck that. That’s unsustainable and will only result in the end of piracy. We should feel bad for being leechers forever, imo. And we should strive to assist the causes we believe in, however we can.

            On a similar note, I struggle to reconcile my contempt of Russian/Chinese policies with my adoration and support for piracy and the brave souls that maintain all the big projects we enjoy/rely on.

        • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.worldEnglish
          92·
          9 months ago

          We don’t, that’s kinda the point. If you want to compensate the developers, you should buy their games.

    • Samueru@lemmy.worldEnglish
      102·
      9 months ago

      Early access releases are effectively SOLD, they fucked around with manifest/build files, abused GPL to go after some forks back when they were Citra, attacked other forks/emulators then benefitted from their work and even replicated their practices (like CEMU’s patreon), etc

      Source on this?

      Also saying that EA was being sold is false, they were shipping precompiled binaries with the EA branches for the patrons, they were actually using the people that paid them for testing lol.

      If you used linux there was even an Aur package that built yuzu ea for you, which I quickly stopped using because EA was just the equivalent of the testing repo of archlinux, if you ever read their updates on their main discord, half the time the next EA release just removed a PR that broke something after release.

      Progress reports timed suspiciously close to major Nintendo first-party releases

      They only made progress reports once a month lol, and iirc the progress report for totk was several weeks after release even.

      Its presence on the OFFICIAL Android play store rather than an apk competes with Nintendo’s own Android games (undermining both those and the Switch)

      Nothing wrong here, even dolphin has a official apk on the playstore, and yuzu actually even released a non playstore apk for people like me with an ungoogled phone lol.

      Extensive telemetry, itself juicy data that could be sold for advertisers, on top of Nintendo’s own built-in telemetry that’s also sent

      Bullshit, their logs only contain info about the hardware, which is something you need to debug lol, Ryu logs are the same.

      ATTEMPTED to make a competitor to the Switch Online service, using files from an external preservation group, and it would have been a PAID service, and the subscription MORE EXPENSIVE than Nintendo’s actual service (it was $60 something) despite smaller compatibility, for games still online, as a CLOSED-SOURCE FORK of a GPL PROJECT so that players don’t actually set up their own custom servers to avoid paying Yuzu’s pittance. When there was backlash, they REMOVED all traces of online emulation after they couldn’t profit off it.

      I also want a source on this.

    • Natanael@slrpnk.netEnglish
      81·
      9 months ago

      Very few of those are legally problematic, pretty much just the imagery, possibly GPL issues (but Nintendo wouldn’t have standing for those), and due to copyright weirdness 3rd party online services for games which still have active online services (it shouldn’t be, but that’s how it’s been interpreted)

      Not enough for Nintendo to be able to force the project to stop, but they didn’t want to fight it in court I assume