- cross-posted to:
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
You must log in or register to comment.
Yuzu fucked up. This is about more than the decryption. Yuzu’s actions (copypasta from a fine redditor):
- Massive patreon, to the point it has an LLC set to manage the money flow
- Early access releases are effectively SOLD, they fucked around with manifest/build files, abused GPL to go after some forks back when they were Citra, attacked other forks/emulators then benefitted from their work and even replicated their practices (like CEMU’s patreon), etc
- Actively targets Switch competitors (Steam Deck, Android), to the point Valve once included it in a marketing reel
- Its presence on the OFFICIAL Android play store rather than an apk competes with Nintendo’s own Android games (undermining both those and the Switch)
- Unauthorized use of Nintendo imagery
- Extensive telemetry, itself juicy data that could be sold for advertisers, on top of Nintendo’s own built-in telemetry that’s also sent
- Patreon marketing is heavily focused on games that broke street day release date, and even when they show some “restraint” it’s just a release day post how much better the game runs on a platform that’s not the Nintendo Switch, in the same launch period where most sales happen
- Progress reports timed suspiciously close to major Nintendo first-party releases
- ATTEMPTED to make a competitor to the Switch Online service, using files from an external preservation group, and it would have been a PAID service, and the subscription MORE EXPENSIVE than Nintendo’s actual service (it was $60 something) despite smaller compatibility, for games still online, as a CLOSED-SOURCE FORK of a GPL PROJECT so that players don’t actually set up their own custom servers to avoid paying Yuzu’s pittance. When there was backlash, they REMOVED all traces of online emulation after they couldn’t profit off it.
Yeah their problem was to make it a commercial operation. At that point it’s trivial for Nintendo to show they’ve enriched themselves on the back of ripped ROMs by enabling them.
Whereas if you do everything for free and don’t even accept donations, they’d have a big problem showing that you have any commercial interest and hence can be sued for damages.
Reverse engineering software (and even using small bits of proprietary code when required) in order to make it compatible with other hardware is fully legal (tons of precedent, for emulation specifically see Sega v Accolade and Sony v Connectix), and selling emulators commercially is also fully legal (Sega v Connectix was about a commercial Playstation emulator for the Mac, Sony v Bleem was about a commercial emulator for the PC and Dreamcast)
Nintendo’s legal claims against Yuzu are completely untested and dubious at best, it’s the threat of spending millions of dollars on lawyers that’s very real and effective, they are yet again simply weaponizing the courts and the DMCA like all the other corpo scum before them
The problem is that this shit is a lot of work that we all benefit from… So how do we compensate the devs?
That’s the neat part, you don’t.
Same as any other type of internet piracy. I don’t give money to some guy ripping his movies or games.
The only way to do things like this is anonymously for the shits and giggles. A Patreon to make it their job is one thing, but the fact that they can pay $2.4million shows it went beyond that.
Yeah fuck that. That’s unsustainable and will only result in the end of piracy. We should feel bad for being leechers forever, imo. And we should strive to assist the causes we believe in, however we can.
On a similar note, I struggle to reconcile my contempt of Russian/Chinese policies with my adoration and support for piracy and the brave souls that maintain all the big projects we enjoy/rely on.
We don’t, that’s kinda the point. If you want to compensate the developers, you should buy their games.
How about the work of the devs that made the game…?
Very few of those are legally problematic, pretty much just the imagery, possibly GPL issues (but Nintendo wouldn’t have standing for those), and due to copyright weirdness 3rd party online services for games which still have active online services (it shouldn’t be, but that’s how it’s been interpreted)
Not enough for Nintendo to be able to force the project to stop, but they didn’t want to fight it in court I assume
Early access releases are effectively SOLD, they fucked around with manifest/build files, abused GPL to go after some forks back when they were Citra, attacked other forks/emulators then benefitted from their work and even replicated their practices (like CEMU’s patreon), etc
Source on this?
Also saying that EA was being sold is false, they were shipping precompiled binaries with the EA branches for the patrons, they were actually using the people that paid them for testing lol.
If you used linux there was even an Aur package that built yuzu ea for you, which I quickly stopped using because EA was just the equivalent of the testing repo of archlinux, if you ever read their updates on their main discord, half the time the next EA release just removed a PR that broke something after release.
Progress reports timed suspiciously close to major Nintendo first-party releases
They only made progress reports once a month lol, and iirc the progress report for totk was several weeks after release even.
Its presence on the OFFICIAL Android play store rather than an apk competes with Nintendo’s own Android games (undermining both those and the Switch)
Nothing wrong here, even dolphin has a official apk on the playstore, and yuzu actually even released a non playstore apk for people like me with an ungoogled phone lol.
Extensive telemetry, itself juicy data that could be sold for advertisers, on top of Nintendo’s own built-in telemetry that’s also sent
Bullshit, their logs only contain info about the hardware, which is something you need to debug lol, Ryu logs are the same.
ATTEMPTED to make a competitor to the Switch Online service, using files from an external preservation group, and it would have been a PAID service, and the subscription MORE EXPENSIVE than Nintendo’s actual service (it was $60 something) despite smaller compatibility, for games still online, as a CLOSED-SOURCE FORK of a GPL PROJECT so that players don’t actually set up their own custom servers to avoid paying Yuzu’s pittance. When there was backlash, they REMOVED all traces of online emulation after they couldn’t profit off it.
I also want a source on this.
It’s really just that they profited from it.
If it was more than just that, they would have, or will in the near future, go after Ryujinx or the many incoming forks of Yuzu.
Here is the latest stable build of Yuzu that I’ve got from 24 hours ago for anyone who wasn’t able to download it in time.
Thank you, that’s very considerate of you.
The list of reasons why I refuse to buy Nintendo products is getting pretty hefty at this point.
Tbh in a third world country, Nintendo is a very big luxury. I never imagined buying one at any point in my life. I will buy a steamdeck as soon as it launches in my country.
What else?
Well there’s the fact that they’re selling switch release titles for full price 7 years later
If they can they will, it’s how supply and demand works. It wouldn’t work if people stopped paying so much for old games.
Yeah I mean that’s literally what the original guy said. This is a reason not to buy their products.
Exactly, and OP is saying they’ve decided to not contribute towards demand anymore
Is it still supply and demand when the supply is infinite?
Yes, if there’s no demand there would be no point in making the supply (the game)
We’re talking about the prices of games that have already been made though. The supply of those specific games is infinite. We’re talking about the prices of certain games (old ones), not all games that are being released now.
I do agree that it makes sense to Nintendo to sell the old games at a high price, but I think supply and demand is probably the wrong phrase.
I’m talking about supply AND demand. If there is infinite supply and zero demand, there would be no point to rerelease these titles. Or they’d bring the price down. This is basic knowledge. If they can get that price for it, they will keep selling it for that price. It’s not rocket science.
I’m not defending the price, I’ve bought plenty and felt dirty doing so lol.
Ryujinx is still around, also fuck Nintendo even thought I had bought all the games I play on Yuzu from here on out if I ever buy a Nintendo console it will be only if there is a method to pirate games on that shit. They don’t deserve my money cause their hardware is shit it was 5 years outdated when the switch came out. I want to play my games at 60 FPS and without my eyes bleeding due to the shit resolution and anti-aliasing. So if they want my money they need to pull a Sony and release their games on pc!
You wanna believe I downloaded it as soon as this was announced. Been playing some Metroid Dread on a 32 inch monitor with a controller that doesn’t cramp up my hands the past couple of days. Thanks for giving me the push I needed Nintendo! I might have just been happy with my Steam library instead.
Can you share the repo?
A user named kadu was offering it up to all in the earlier thread. He said it’d be available as long as he was around. Just DM him for the link.
Rip yuzu
In completely unrelated news, I now have a private repo on my private gitea that has a lot of c++ code
In even more unrelated news, does anybody know of some good spots to bury random flash drives containing a lot of C++ code?
Cool, how it’s going with fixing current bugs? Switch 2 support is coming along nicely I assume?
I jest, but Nintendo didn’t expect the current version of the project to disappear. They just wanted to stop further development, which will over time make it less relevant, and most importantly won’t be a problem for Switch 2 games.
If these guys were making money off their emulator then it’s not surprising in the least that Nintendo gutted them.
Three trick to being a parasite is that you can’t attract the hosts attention in any way. If you start eating the hosts food they goanna swat you.
What kinda fucken bootlicky head-ass take is that?
It’s just how the world works mate. Call me names all you like but any company is going to sue you if you start making money off their IP.
Not really. I run a smaller emulation project (based out of Canada and have paid my fair share in preemptive lawyers who have all told me despite taking literally zero donations, the not for profit I set up can be can be sued for $$$ per player/download I get
Yeah but you don’t have money to sue for
Yeah in that case they could shut you down, but they couldn’t sue you for recompensation.
Well yeah but the existence of a not-for-profit means that there’s some kind of benefit being provided to some class of people. If someone elses IP is involved in that and you’re not paying for it then they might give you a cease and desist even if there’s no money.
What you said is simply completely untrue
I don’t care very much. You’re the one telling the story but not providing any information.
The existence of a not-for-profit implies there’s some value somewhere. If there’s no value then you don’t need the structure.
Tell any lawyer or CPA that you have a not-for-profit involved in intellectual property infringement and they will tell you the NFP is liable on that basis.
Thanks again for your inaccurate comment. I’m not sure why you insist on telling me to ask lawyers about things I literally said I paid lawyers for in my parent comment.
I’ve talked with lawyers who helped me navigate the subject, and spent over 1,000$ in fees to do so. What you said again, is false. Having a not for profit means neither myself nor my contributors can be easily punished directly for our work (excluding some logic about piercing the corporate veil, which is highly unlikely). The whole idea of legal entities is so they can take the legal risk and fall for risky business activities. The not for profit may fold and go bankrupt if sued, but that outcome is hundreds of times better than me being personally sued.
It’s how legality in regards to something like emulators works. Emulation is not illegal, but profiteering from games being ripped and played without a legal license is. Which Yuzu did.
No, that’s also not how it works. Reverse engineering and making a profit from your clone is legal. Breaking DRM for compatibility reasons is in fact exempted and legal too. Nintendos argument is that they broke DRM for piracy, but the tools can still be legal and legal precedence supports that
I think it’s pretty accurate. Nintendo is super protective of their IP and they don’t like others profiting from it in any way.
Bleem was also paid software. I think people are forgetting that, at the time, downloading software over the Internet wasn’t super common. Software was distributed with discs. In a box. At the store. Which sold things. For money.
Is there any way to turn off Yuzu auto-update? I don’t want my computer connecting to a website that Nintendo now owns every time I boot up Yuzu.
Good point. I added yuzu-emu.org and all its subdomains to my custom blocklist in adguard for now. Alternatively you can put yuzu-emu.org, api.yuzu-emu.org and profile.yuzu-emu.org on your host file to block them.
Edit the computer hosts file to resolve yuzu-emu.org to 0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.1? That will stop it from connecting, at least.
Assuming you’re using Windows: https://www.howtogeek.com/784196/how-to-edit-the-hosts-file-on-windows-10-or-11/
Point its domain at 127.0.0.1.
You can do the same on Linux by editing
/etc/hosts
Here ist the latest mainline Windows build: https://archive.org/details/yuzu-windows-msvc-20240227-120358cf6
Damn, I modded my Switch JUST in time! Thanks for giving me the motivation, Nintendo!
The team behind Yuzu is different from ReSwitched and Atmosphere, so you were fine either way.
This just means Yuzu agrees to delete their copies of the tools they used and send Nintendo their hacked Switch consoles (probably to be destroyed).
Although the fact that these programs were named means that Nintendo’s Eye of Sauron is on them - the extra attention makes me nervous. I definitely would have modded it this weekend if I hadn’t already decided to last weekend.
There is no world where these tools exists and Nintendo does not know them. It’s not some deep darknet secret lore hidden behind seven-VPN. Anything that happens online about emulation, all the company knows it exists and how it works. The threat never goes away.
I know, but there’s a difference between “knows they exist” and “is naming them in legal documentation”.
Wait Yuzu were behind all the other tools?? Surely that was other people?
Pretty sure they’re all by other people. Maybe they were hosting copies on their own server or something? Possibly they were just using them for Yuzu development.
I’m more than a little miffed that Nintendo has my Patreon dollars.
Teaches you not to donate to commercial companies like Yuzu, they can run their own show. Or couldn’t, I suppose. 😅
Nintendo,
reinventing themselves as a law-suite company
which also publishes games on the side…They are becoming Oracle…
More like the Disney of video games.
Which is an important distinction, and when people compare this to Oracle that just tells me they - lucky for them, tbh! - never had to actually deal with Oracle on a corporate level. Oracle is so much worse than Nintendo, Disney and Audi all put together.
They already are
I’m sure something else will eventually come along. The only way to stop emulators from existing is to not have a system at all. I.e., if Nintendo were to stop making video game hardware, then there would be no new emulators except for ones developed for previous/existing hardware.
Ryujinx hasn’t gone anywhere.
It probably will soon. They have a Patreon and also use
prod.keysto decrypt games, and now Nintendo knows they can succeed on forcing settlements over this.Their problem is - as always with this - the fact that they accept money for it. Granted in Ryujinx’s case Nintendo has a far far far bigger barrier to climb as they weren’t idiots who created a whole bloody LLC for it, which trivially proved commercial interest.
You have to use prod.keys, don’t you? There shouldn’t be anything illegal about using prod.keys as long as you don’t distribute the file.
Decrypting the ROM ahead of time and requiring that to be used would be the safe alternative.
It would require a separate tool to do that first, but decoupling the steps would prevent Nintendo from going after the much-harder-to-develop emulator using the argument they used here. If they kill the decryption tool, another one pops up.
I don’t know if this would ‘satisfy’ them (I know it wouldn’t, I’m referring strictly to the legal stuff). From what I’ve heard, the point Nintendo was making wrt the encryption is that aquiring
prod.keysin any way, shape or form is illegal. Of course, creating an emulator for a system that only runs games that contain encryption which can only be undone withprod.keysrequires the developers to have this file. Since they’ve successfully made an emulator, this implies that the Yuzu team has in fact obtained a copy of this file and done something naughty.The problem is that, regardless of whether or not the decryption happens in Yuzu or in another completely separate program, modern Nintendo games do not come unencrypted. This means that someone at some point has to decrypt the files, and thus has to use
prod.keysto do so. According to Nintendo, using and creating any emulator for a modern system requires someone to do something illegal at one point in the chain, and therefore emulation (by parties not explicitly authorized by Nintendo) cannot legally exist.I say that Nintendo should piss off after I’ve bought something from them and that I should be allowed to do with my property as I please, but even the most legally and morally correct way to emulate is not okay with them.
This raises the following question: if Nintendo does not respect in the slightest our property rights by pulling such stunts, why should we as end users respect their intellectual property rights? Why go through all the effort of clean room reverse engineering a console instead of blatantly copying as much of the official code base as possible if the legal system punishes you all the same? Why limit yourself to only emulating games you personally ripped from your own cartridges if the act of ripping has already placed your actions into the “illegal” category?
The emulator itself doesn’t necessarily have to exist only to run retail games. It could be used to develop or debug homebrew and marketed as such. They wouldn’t even need to have decrypted the operating system to understand it, as Atmosphère is a complete reimplementation untainted by Nintendo code.
If it ran retail games as a consequence of being accurate to real hardware, that would just be a happy accident. And as long as the developers don’t acknowledge running retail games and don’t directly assist in fixing them, they have plausible deniability.
This raises the following question: if Nintendo does not respect in the slightest our property rights by pulling such stunts, why should we as end users respect their intellectual property rights?
I’m a big fan of the “buy a game and crack it right after” philosophy. Respect property rights until something is in one’s legitimate possession, and then remove any encumbrances preventing it from being used in the way the purchaser wanted.
Ryujinx still exists…though probably not for long.
Ok, so I’m not gonna buy anything from Nintendo anymore. Got it.
You already didn’t.
Let’s be real here, they weren’t shut down for being an emulator, they were shut down for charging money and making bank, while also planning a parallel paid online service. All the other emulator projects are trucking along just fine, even if Nintendo hates some of them for decades by now.
