Nintendo: A single swipe eliminates 8,535 emulators

Nintendo isn’t necessarily the biggest fan of emulators, that should be abundantly clear by now. After a legal dispute against the switch emulator Yuzu was won in March 2024 and it was taken offline as a result, a DMC strike has now caused tons of further takedowns.

Nintendo’s recent success in the fight against emulation of its own hardware is certainly impressive. A whopping 8,535 Github repositories were taken offline at once. The reason: They contained emulators that use source code from the now defunct Yuzu program. Nintendo eliminated this in the course of a legal dispute regarding the pirated copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

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What’s also impressive is that this massive cleanup was achieved with just one DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) strike. In this, Nintendo stated that the Github pages offer code that “offers access to the Yuzu emulator or code based on the Yuzu emulator that illegally bypasses Nintendo’s technological protections and plays illegal copies of Nintendo games.”

This one strike triggered a real domino effect. Github also commented on the issue: “Since the reported network that contained the suspected illegal content included more than 100 repositories and the submitter [Nintendo] “claiming that all or most forks were infringing to the same extent as the parent repository, Github processed the takedown notice against the entire network of 8,535 repositories, including parent repositories.”

Or to put it more simply, caught up, hanging along. Because all the providers are collectively to blame and accordingly they are all responsible for the illegal distribution of pirated copies.

The yuzu developers of Tropical Haze were recently ordered to pay a whopping $2.4 million. In the wake of the Yuzu ban, the 3DS emulator Citra was also directly affected.