Tuesday, October 1st 2024
Nintendo Takes Down Ryujinx Emulator, YouTube Videos Showing Emulation Get Strikes
Nintendo is living up to its litigious reputation this week, with news reports emerging of the gaming giant issuing a massive wave of copyright strikes on any YouTube videos containing footage of emulation. In addition to this, it seems like Nintendo may have had some harsh words for the lead developer of a popular open-source Switch emulator.
As of an announcement today, the open-source Switch emulator, Ryujinx, is no longer available for download from its GitHub repository. One of the more active developers for the project confirmed via a message in the official Discord that the lead developer, who goes by gdkchan, was contacted by Nintendo with an "offer," although given the outcome of the interaction, it was likely less an offer and more a threat. Shortly before that, Retro Game Corps, a popular content creator in the Nintendo emulation community, posted on X that his YouTube channel had received multiple copyright strikes, requiring that he move away from showing game emulation on-screen.
Ryujinx was an open-source, cross-platform Switch emulator written in C#, and had been in development since 2017. During its time as an active emulator, the developers and contributors of Ryujinx managed to validate approximately 3,400 Switch games as playable and port the emulator to Windows 10, Windows 11, macOS, and Linux. The project also managed to rack up a rather substantial following, with nearly 15,000 stars on GitHub and over 500 Patreon followers. At the time of writing, the emulator's download page is still up, but the actual content on the page has been removed and replaced with white space. The message posted to the Ryujinx Discord server reads:
Sources:
Ryujinx Discord, Retro Game Corps on X
As of an announcement today, the open-source Switch emulator, Ryujinx, is no longer available for download from its GitHub repository. One of the more active developers for the project confirmed via a message in the official Discord that the lead developer, who goes by gdkchan, was contacted by Nintendo with an "offer," although given the outcome of the interaction, it was likely less an offer and more a threat. Shortly before that, Retro Game Corps, a popular content creator in the Nintendo emulation community, posted on X that his YouTube channel had received multiple copyright strikes, requiring that he move away from showing game emulation on-screen.
Yesterday, gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and offered an agreement to stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets he's in control of. While awaiting confirmation on whether he would take this agreement, the organization has been removed, so I think it's safe to say what the outcome is.Anyone that follows gaming news with any form of regularity will know that this is far from the first time Nintendo has taken such a hard stance against emulation and content creators, especially those showing Nintendo games in their videos. While game-streaming is something of a gray area, it's generally overlooked by copyright holders, because most game publishers recognize that having their game on a YouTube or Twitch stream should generally have a positive effect on the game's popularity.
79 Comments on Nintendo Takes Down Ryujinx Emulator, YouTube Videos Showing Emulation Get Strikes
Oh well, since its EOL or nearly is for the switch, I guess what we got is good enough.
Cetra, Yuzu and now Ryujinx. There will be something else but still. Not even Sony is this vindictive as Nintendo.
Kinda shame, no emulation. It was always fun for me to try these things.
Anyone remembers VisualBoyAdvance? The original developer basically disappeared - and that was in 2004. I never knew why as a young lad, at 11-12 years old all I knew is that I found it absolutely bananas that my beloved Game Boy games ran on my banged up AMD K6 PC at the time - and since then, I've grown to strongly suspect that it was also a backroom deal to blame. The truth, I think few people know or remember 20 years later.
VBA had famously high compatibility even when compared to much newer and higher footprint emulators, even though by modern emulation standards it's complete garbage (it doesn't emulate many quirks of the hardware such as scratch RAM and is relatively inaccurate - to the extent that you could leverage its inaccuracy to manipulate glitches in Pokémon Red and Blue for example) - but you could still play games that were released after its final release such as Pokémon Emerald just fine on it - and I bet on it that most of us grew up doing just that!
Switch 1 v1 is non oled=gen1 v1
Switch 1 v2 is oled=gen1 v2
Switch 2 v1 non oled=gen2 v1
Switch 2 v2 oled?=gen2 v2
The Switch has such a weak Hardware that it's truly laughable... and knowing that the Switch 2 should be close to a PS4 (that will be a 12 years old console in 2025...) seems even worse lol.
When we see how more and more demanding new games are (mostly on UE5), I think developers are going to struggle real hard to run any new game in the next 2-3 years ... TsssNintendo are definitely a scam company when it comes to Console Hardware... When I see the Switch OLED being sold for $350 when it's between a PS3 and PS4 performance-wise but people complain about the PS5 Pro being sold for $700 when it's at least 15x more powerful...lol
Personally I don't even like their exclusives, Mario and Zelda games were dope in the 2D era but after that, nah.
Corporations are non-living financial mechanisms designed to generate as much profit as possible — which means providing as little value to customers as they can get away with. They don't have feelings. They don't sleep. They don't get sick. They don't get old and retire. They exist for as long as possible to take as much as possible and to give the community as little as possible.
As Ambrose Bierce said (quoted in Civ V), the corporation is an invention to provide individual profit without individual responsibility. Ordinary people are confused into referring to them with human terms, such as by referring to them as "they" and "who" — as if they're alive. They use personalities like CEOs to confuse people into believing that they're somehow human. A great exposé of that was in the Black Mirror episode in which an AI CEO explains (without you knowing she's AI) why ruining people's lives is good business. Once you learn she's AI herself, you realize that you've been had in more ways than one.
I don't know if humanity can do better than corporations but while we're under their thumb we should know what they are, what they do.
Anyway, I know that companies aren't living beings, only legal entities. But who made that happen? Who's behind them? Who reaps the benefits when the company is doing well? Shareholders, right? Aren't they human?