Tuesday, October 1st 2024
Nintendo Takes Down Ryujinx Emulator, YouTube Videos Showing Emulation Get Strikes
Nintendo is living up to its litigious reputation this week, with news reports emerging of the gaming giant issuing a massive wave of copyright strikes on any YouTube videos containing footage of emulation. In addition to this, it seems like Nintendo may have had some harsh words for the lead developer of a popular open-source Switch emulator.
As of an announcement today, the open-source Switch emulator, Ryujinx, is no longer available for download from its GitHub repository. One of the more active developers for the project confirmed via a message in the official Discord that the lead developer, who goes by gdkchan, was contacted by Nintendo with an "offer," although given the outcome of the interaction, it was likely less an offer and more a threat. Shortly before that, Retro Game Corps, a popular content creator in the Nintendo emulation community, posted on X that his YouTube channel had received multiple copyright strikes, requiring that he move away from showing game emulation on-screen.Ryujinx was an open-source, cross-platform Switch emulator written in C#, and had been in development since 2017. During its time as an active emulator, the developers and contributors of Ryujinx managed to validate approximately 3,400 Switch games as playable and port the emulator to Windows 10, Windows 11, macOS, and Linux. The project also managed to rack up a rather substantial following, with nearly 15,000 stars on GitHub and over 500 Patreon followers. At the time of writing, the emulator's download page is still up, but the actual content on the page has been removed and replaced with white space. The message posted to the Ryujinx Discord server reads:
Sources:
Ryujinx Discord, Retro Game Corps on X
As of an announcement today, the open-source Switch emulator, Ryujinx, is no longer available for download from its GitHub repository. One of the more active developers for the project confirmed via a message in the official Discord that the lead developer, who goes by gdkchan, was contacted by Nintendo with an "offer," although given the outcome of the interaction, it was likely less an offer and more a threat. Shortly before that, Retro Game Corps, a popular content creator in the Nintendo emulation community, posted on X that his YouTube channel had received multiple copyright strikes, requiring that he move away from showing game emulation on-screen.Ryujinx was an open-source, cross-platform Switch emulator written in C#, and had been in development since 2017. During its time as an active emulator, the developers and contributors of Ryujinx managed to validate approximately 3,400 Switch games as playable and port the emulator to Windows 10, Windows 11, macOS, and Linux. The project also managed to rack up a rather substantial following, with nearly 15,000 stars on GitHub and over 500 Patreon followers. At the time of writing, the emulator's download page is still up, but the actual content on the page has been removed and replaced with white space. The message posted to the Ryujinx Discord server reads:
Yesterday, gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and offered an agreement to stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets he's in control of. While awaiting confirmation on whether he would take this agreement, the organization has been removed, so I think it's safe to say what the outcome is.Anyone that follows gaming news with any form of regularity will know that this is far from the first time Nintendo has taken such a hard stance against emulation and content creators, especially those showing Nintendo games in their videos. While game-streaming is something of a gray area, it's generally overlooked by copyright holders, because most game publishers recognize that having their game on a YouTube or Twitch stream should generally have a positive effect on the game's popularity.
69 Comments on Nintendo Takes Down Ryujinx Emulator, YouTube Videos Showing Emulation Get Strikes
f Nintendo and their pathetic hw
I'll stick with my old SNES from which Nintendo will receive no revenue with which to prosecute their excessive application of intellectual property.
Don't promote grifters. Development will continue, the problem is the quality of it.
Real talent moved to other areas, you're left with fresh people learning the trade, or borderline criminals promising heaven and never delivering.
It will take years to get real progress done now.
sudachi is a fork of yuzu as well, but open and maintained, and it continues improving on the emulator
the way yuzu was built is shady, but the code is on the internet forever so there's nothing nintendo can do
btw I actually buy the games I play, but having owned a Switch I just find the hw too pathetic, 20 fps...argh... some of the games are great tho, and playing them at locked 60 fps / 4k is the way to honor the creators
Every time someone asks him to provide the source, he eternally stalls. Great fella.
Sadly two sides are not on equal footing to make their case and nintendo can just bully it's viewpoint across.
The question is, would you risk it alone?
Sorta the whole ripping/copying CD's and DVD's years ago?
Suppose they have something in their EULA that puts the nix on that argument.