Gameranx recently reported that Russian website VK Play is offering Nintendo games such as The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Animal Crossing: New Horizons through Yuzu – according to their source, to an X user named Pirat_Nation.
Following Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, many international companies such as Nintendo, as well as payment services Visa and Mastercard, ceased or at least limited operations in the country. As a result, physical Nintendo Switch games are no longer being shipped to Russia, and the Nintendo eShop in that country has been placed under maintenance.
VK Play has been confirmed to have links to the cloud server for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but other games, and from other companies, may also be illegally hosted on the platform. If Pirat_Nation is correct in his post, then that would mean the cloud connects to the server farm running the game via Yuzu.
(Earlier this year, Yuzu agreed to pay Nintendo $2.4 million in damages, and under that agreement all Yuzu emulators were to be removed, along with their copies.)
X users noticed that the game listings on the site were removed after Pirat_Nation’s post, but Gameranx confirmed that, as of this writing, they are still active. As proof, they provided a screenshot of the page for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which can be seen below, translated via Google Translate:
VKontakte, the social media website that powers VK Play, has been the subject of lawsuits at home and abroad that can be traced back to the Kremlin. Its chief executive, Vladimir Kiriyenko, is under sanctions from the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union over the war, and most of its shares are owned by Gazprom, Russia’s largest company, which is itself half-owned by the Russian government.
