I am not part of that scene, but I am sympathetic to emulation. Is there a notable difference between Yuzu and other switch emulators? I wonder if there are other reasons than Patreon ( money changing hands ) or there were other considerations?
Yuzu has amazing compatibility. I'm guessing it's getting too good for Nintendo. Their concerns with TotK are not without merit. I played it on Yuzu (on PC) because it was a much better experience than on the switch. Within a few days of the game being out, there were resolution and fps patches which made the game run much better. That said, I'm not sure how Yuzu can be blamed for TotK piracy. Guessing Nintendo is throwing a hail mary here and hoping they can connect the dots during discovery.
I hope this doesn't spell the end of Yuzu, because I use it to play switch games that I own on my steam deck.
Seems like it’d be more productive to reduce attrition of this sort by releasing a Switch with less-anemic hardware. There’s clearly a market for a “Switch Pro” or similar that can run TotK, etc at 60FPS without frame drops.
> Seems like it’d be more productive to reduce attrition of this sort by releasing a Switch with less-anemic hardware.
Truly, but you are preaching to the choir. I am a big fan of SMTV series, and since it was a Switch exclusive, I bought it on the release day. I wasn't happy about 30fps (which I knew about beforehand), but it wouldn't be a barrier for me to enjoy a great game, so I went into it despite knowing that.
Long story short, I dropped the game just a few hours into it, and decided to wait until it gets a release on absolutely any other platform (and luckily enough, it was announced just last week). Turns out, 30fps was an aspirational goal, as literally in the first non-tutorial area of the game (the desert, I forgot the name), 30fps would rarely even hit, and the game would hover between 15-25fps the entire time. I just couldn't do it, no matter how good the game is.
Nintendo straight up ruined a game for me that I was already liking, all due to the Switch hardware. I am not even asking for much, even 30fps would be fine. But I cannot stomach FPS oscillating between 15-25fps in multiple major areas where you spend a lot of time in a game.
> Seems like it’d be more productive to reduce attrition of this sort by releasing a Switch with less-anemic hardware.
That is difficult for Nintendo, the GPU architecture used on the switch is long dead, so Nintendo has no easy way of releasing a better switch. Because of that they will probably wait as much as possible and then release a completely new console with only limited backwards compatibility.
Jennifer Crumbley was found guilty of manslaughter for doing nothing to prevent her son from shooting up his school.
That was criminal court with a much higher standard than a civil case.
Nintendo has consistently been one of the strongest protectors of their IP, and a defense that says “We tell users not to commit piracy” is about as effective as a sex workers disclaimer that “money is exchanged for time.”
That case is in regards to a guardian figure who has some level of legal responsibility for the children in their care. In that case it makes sense to hold someone accountable for the actions of someone else because the person in question agreed to that when they became a guardian.
Software developers should not be held liable for what their users do with the software unless the software itself does something illegal (such as malware that gains unauthorized access to secure systems). If developers were responsible for their users then you would have all kinds of bizarre lawsuits. You would be able to sue Microsoft for things written by users in Word. It wouldn't be a stretch to sue Linux contributers because someone used the OS to perform a DOS attack or to host a scam site.
I haven't looked at Nintendo's materials, but I would think they were able to find enough evidence to get them past any preliminary dismissal motions, and get to discovery in which case Nintendo would likely get access to all communications and electronic files (read: source code).
I think Nintendo would be banking that the Yuzu team likely had lax (if at anything) policies and processes for compliance to their public stance on piracy.
No because the primary use of Linux is not piracy. Whereas for emulation it is.
The whole point of emulation is that you want to play content for which the original hardware no longer exists. And so there is no harm being done to anyone.
This situation is obviously quite different because Nintendo is being harmed.
That's all well and good if true, but Patreon is based in the USA, so even if the people behind it aren't (which they presumably are, as the stated "Tropic Haze LLC" is also USA-based), they have to comply with the laws in that jurisdiction.
Creating a private copy and using it is absolutely legal. Breaching an "effective" copy protection scheme can be illegal, but "effective" is defined through case law, and can range from "DVD DRM isn't effective" to "rolling ciphers on YouTube are effective" depending on court.
Perhaps that's true, but not because it would be piracy. Backing up media for personal has a pretty strong fair use claim, so I don't think it should be considered copyright infringement.
But there is also the DMCA, and the anti-circumvention provision, which can be attributed a lot more to the user backing up their game than it can be to the developers of the emulator. But that wouldn't be the same thing as copyright infringement.
That said, if the"interoperability exception" applies to anything at all, I feel like it should apply here. You are circumventing copy protection mechanisms for the explicit purpose of interoperability with other software.
On moral grounds, I also have absolutely no qualms whatsoever with someone circumventing copy protection mechanisms to make a copy of a thing they bought to use for personal use. The fact that that could be potentially illegal at all is disgusting.
If only we had a universal way to easily distribute data, without need to heavily license it, instead opting for easily accessible licenses from reputable sources at market prices...
(we do, but torrents got a bad name)
Netflix was a success not because it was a streaming service with a license fee, but because it provided unfettered access to data for a small fee.
Of course, now there are AIs which can or will shortly be able to trivially reproduce most data formats, so that's a separate issue as far as that goes (and that's bad too, if AI spells the complete death of DMCA), but it really didn't need to be this complicated.
Make your brand well recognized, make your products easy to obtain, go after the pirates not the users. I own a switch and TBH a lot of my enthusiasm is pretty chilled by Nintendo's dickery - I'm less likely to purchase their products (and I'll elsewhere with non-Nintendo stuff - and Nintendo's stuff is honestly becoming a lot of locked down crap these days).
You need to use a less general term than 'emulation' to make that claim.
Your OS emulates. The companies that made the chips you run them on emulate their own hardware. The company in the headline emulate their own video game hardware and sell it to their customers.
What exactly do you mean by "patches were created before the game got officially released" ? It was my impression that some patches had been going around, but that they certainly weren't created by or endorsed by the Yuzu project in any official capacity - I don't see how random people creating patches for open source projects should give rise to any legal liability to the original project.
What I mean is that the game got leaked like 2 weeks before it's official release, - so on 4chan I think some anons created 60 fps patches a few days later, effectively creating patches before the game even got released.
This had nothing to do with Yuzu, I'm just remarking at how fast the community worked on it.
> That said, I'm not sure how Yuzu can be blamed for TotK piracy.
>> I played it on Yuzu (on PC) because it was a much better experience than on the switch.
I blame you, actually, (somewhat jokingly) because I own TotK for Switch, and ended up putting it away really quickly because the resolution in handheld mode looked awful. I actually couldn't stand playing the game in handheld mode while my wife took over the TV for her shows.
