Yesterday, the news surfaced that Nintendo of America Inc. had mutually agreed with Tropic Haze LLC to settle a lawsuit with the latter company being ordered to pay $2.4 million in damages. This was a short-lived lawsuit raised on the claim that Tropic Haze had facilitated piracy of Nintendo’s Tears of the Kingdom title in 2023 through its Yuzu emulation platform.
Now, Tropic Haze has reached out on social media to its fanbase to post a statement mourning the shutdown of the firm.
‘Piracy Should End’
Despite allegedly allowing more than one million downloads of Tears of the Kingdom before the game was released in May 2023 on its platform, Tropic Haze stressed numerous times in its recent statement that it’s against piracy. One of the biggest sticking points in this debacle is that Tropic Haze ran a Patreon subscription service for its Yuzu platform, which means that the company was ‘getting paid’ for offering these emulated Nintendo games – including the then-unreleased Tears of the Kingdom.
Here’s what Tropic Haze said in a recent statement on social media:
Yuzu and its team have always been against piracy. We started the projects in good faith, out of passion for Nintendo and its consoles and games, and were not intending to cause harm. But we see now that because our projects can circumvent NIntenod’s technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorised hardware, they have led to extensive piracy.
In particular, we have been deeply disappointed when users have used our software to leak game content prior to its release and ruin the experience for legitimate purchasers and fans.
We have come to the decision that we cannot continue to allow this to occur. Piracy was never our intention, and we believe that piracy of video games and on video game consoles should end. Effective today, we will be pulling our code repositories offline, discontinuing our Patreon accounts and Discord servers, and soon, shutting down our websites. We hope our actions will be a small step toward ending piracy of all creators’ works.
Yuzu’s socials have been cleared down ahead of the global shutdown, marking a bitter end for the service that has been around for more than six years. This isn’t the first emulation platform that Nintendo has taken legal action against, and it probably won’t be the last.
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Corporate bootlickers. Piracy cannot cause demonstrable harm. All they’re doing is facilitating upwards transfers of wealth.