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With Yuzu and Citra gone, why is Dolphin seemingly unaffected?
Given the fact that Yuzu (a Nintendo Switch emulator) and Citra (a Nintendo 3DS emulator) were recently taken down by Nintendo's legal team, is there a reason why Dolphin (an emulator for Gamecube and Nintendo Wii) is still going strong? Did Dolphin take any extra steps to protect themselves from lawsuits, or it's just a case of Nintendo taking their time?
Dolphin doesn't a) run a highly successful Patreon, and b) advertise their emulator using screenshots of AAA titles that just released. There are no technical reasons they're different, they're just better at not poking the bear that is the Big N
Or in Yuzu's case, games that have only been leaked. Kind of destroys any argument that you're not supporting piracy if you can't yet legally play the game.
I did not know that! No wonder Nintendo annihilated them.
That directly demonstrates they knew they were profiting both from piracy and leaked games. Insanely stupid.
I think we keep underestimating your point a in our discussion on Yuzu. Not only did they have a highly successful Patreon, which means they were making money off the emulator, but they also were incorporated as an LLC (Tropic Haze LLC) which appeared to have somewhere in the area of $2.4 million in assets. Correct me if I am wrong, but Dolphin doesn't have any of these things. Dolphin is fully open source software, worked on by hundreds of developers, for free, completely in their spare time. Who would Nintendo sue for Dolphin? They could come after the lead developer, but doing so would not shut down the project. It is a very different situation that what Yuzu developers have done. To be frank, I think Topic Haze LLC did some very foolish things with Yuzu and Citra that were very different from what most of the emulation scene has been about for the past 30+ years, and it was mostly in the name of enriching themselves.
totk got leaked a week before launch
More like a month! It was like the prophecy of “my uncle works at Nintendo” come true for most of April
I don't think there's any particular reason other than that Nintendo hasn't decided to file suit yet. These would be civil torts, not criminal, so it would be up to the injured party to bring suit.
The main argument Nintendo had against Yuzu was that, even though it did not provide the encryption key, it implemented the Switch's decryption algorithm and clearly was designed to be used to decrypt, and then access, content which is protected by DRM.
In that respect, Dolphin is even more in violation, since they actually ship the encryption key with the software - Yuzu at least made you get it yourself.
As to why Nintendo hasn't, who knows: maybe it is as simple as just that they don't give a shit since they don't sell Wii or GC games anymore.
I mean I think it's pretty clear. We're talking about software that can emulate the Switch vs the Gamecube and Wii. One of those you can buy off the shelves of a store today, and no doubt the Switch's successor will have a similar enough architecture to the Switch. These emulators will probably be modified to run whatever Nintendo releases next, and by then they might even be at parity with the proprietary hardware in terms of performance. I can already play Legends Arceus on my Steam Deck at parity with actual Switch hardware.
Yuzu/Ryujinx eat into Nitendo's bottom line way more than Dolphin.
To see Dolphin's reasoning on this, you can read their blog post.
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2023/07/20/what-happened-to-dolphin-on-steam/#what-about-the-key
Yuzu's team got cocky, they explicitly advertised piracy with videos of Tears of the Kingdom before it even got released. That plus taking donations was a death sentence. Emulation is ok but as soon as you cross the piracy line, Nintendo will dropkick you.
My impression is that Yuzu maybe took some actions that other emulators haven't, in linking directly to software that grabs decryption keys and such, that put them at greater risk. I've always been curious if Nintendo would go after emulators for older systems (hope not). Thankfully, regardless of whether they do, entire system libraries and emulator tools are so widely available at this point (including on torrents and such) that they'll never truly make a dent in things like they might be able to do for current systems.
Maybe they have a stronger case with Yuzu/Citra than any previous ones, not sure. Hopefully they leave the rest alone, or the rest find ways of remaining under the radar, or take whatever steps might help prevent action from Nintendo. I'm pro-emulation and anti-Nintendo's litigious antics.
Edit: sounds like Dolphin is even worse, so maybe it's just a matter of time at this point (or maybe Dolphin is hosted/coded/etc by someone in a jurisdiction harder for Nintendo to take action in? or like other comments said, maybe just not a focus anymore, being for older systems- notably NES/SNES emulators have been around for the longest time without action taken at this point...)
On the other hand, I was playing on SNES emulators back in the mid 00s. The 3DS is older now than the SNES was back then.
My understanding is the only reason Citra came down is that it was being developed by the same group as Yuzu. Seems like maybe Nintendo just rolled it into the settlement because it was convenient. I believe Yuzu was their target though.
Yeah, Citra is the one that hurts the most. I have no sympathy for people playing TOTK a week before release for free. But the 3DS eshop is totally shutting down, you will have zero legal ways of playing Fates Revelations if you didn't already buy it.
Thankfully, Citra is mature enough that it plays most games flawlessly anyway.
Someone made a professional-looking website for Citra as a legacy project.
I downloaded Citra for the first time a few days ago from that website, so for a while, I didn't even think it was down.
Interesting! I think I'll wait a bit to see which between the last stable and nightly builds end up being the best, but good to see it's still easy to download.
Mildly off topic for the thread, but this made me think: The jumps to 3D graphics on N64/PS1 and to a reasonable number of polygons on Gamecube/PS2 were so large, SNES already felt "retro" less than 10 years since the last SNES game came out. These days, people will fight you that "retro" means "20+ years ago"
Graphics used to evolve much faster. We hit a plateau.