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:

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.