Nintendo: One swipe kills 8,535 emulators

Nintendo isn't necessarily a big fan of emulators, and that should be pretty clear by now. After winning a legal dispute against the Yuzu Switch emulator in March 2024 and being shut down as a result, the DMC strike has now caused several additional takedowns.

Nintendo's recent success in combating emulation of its own hardware is certainly impressive. A whopping 8,535 Github repositories were taken offline at one time. Reason: It contains emulators that use source code from the now-defunct Yuzu software. Nintendo canceled this in the context of a legal dispute regarding pirated copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

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What's also impressive is that this thorough cleanup was achieved with just one DMCA strike. In this, Nintendo stated that the Github pages offer code that “provides access to a Yuzu emulator or code based on a Yuzu emulator that illegally circumvents Nintendo's technology protections and plays illegal copies of Nintendo games.”

This hit triggered a real domino effect. Github also commented on the issue: “Since the reported network containing suspected illegal content included more than 100 repositories and the sender [Nintendo] “Claiming that all or most of the forks were equally infringing as the original repository, Github processed a takedown notice against the entire network of 8,535 repositories, including the original repositories.”

Or to put it more simply, trapped and trapped. Because all service providers are collectively to blame and therefore they are all responsible for the illegal distribution of pirated copies.

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