Switch emulator creator settles Nintendo lawsuit for $2.4m

The creator of a popular Nintendo Switch emulator has settled a Nintendo lawsuit and agreed to pay $2.4 million in damages.

Tropic Haze, the creator of the Switch emulator Yuzu, was sued by Nintendo last month. The platform holder had claimed that Yuzu was “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale”.

On Monday, the two parties mutually agreed on a monetary settlement and permanent injunction.

As part of the judgment by the US District Court of Rhode Island, Tropic Haze was issued with a permanent injunction preventing it from offering or marketing Yuzu or any of its source code in the future.

Its members are also prevented from creating any future software that circumvents Nintendo’s technical protection, and Tropic Haze must surrender all website domains and information related to its emulator.

This permanent injunction constitutes a binding court order, and any violations by Tropic Haze or its members will subject them to the full scope of the Court’s contempt authority, including punitive and monetary sanctions.

In its initial lawsuit documents, Nintendo claimed that last year’s biggest Switch release, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, was pirated over one million times in the week and a half before its release in May.

“With Yuzu in hand, nothing stops a user from obtaining and playing unlawful copies of virtually any game made for the Nintendo Switch, all without paying a dime to Nintendo or to any of the hundreds of other game developers and publishers making and selling games for the Nintendo Switch,” the company said.

“In effect, Yuzu turns general computing devices into tools for massive intellectual property infringement of Nintendo and others’ copyrighted works.”