3DS Emulator Citra Shut Down as Collateral Damage from Yuzu Nintendo Lawsuit

Citra, an emulator for the Nintendo 3DS, has also been shut down following the settlement of the Yuzu Nintendo lawsuit.

As Yuzu lost the lawsuit against Nintendo, the company was also forced to stop all development of their emulators. Since the company is responsible for both Yuzu and Citra, the latter would unfortunately also be shut down as collateral damage from the lawsuit.

Notably. Yuzu and Citra have been quickly removed from their respective GitHub page. If you try to find the software through the old link, you’ll be met with a 404 not found page.

Tropic Haze has also released an official statement on the matter on both Yuzu and Citra’s websites, the statement reads:

Hello yuz-ers and Citra fans:

We write today to inform you that yuzu and yuzu’s support of Citra are being discontinued, effective immediately.

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 Nintendo’s technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized 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.

Thank you for your years of support and for understanding our decision.

While this seems like the end of Yuzu and Citra as a whole, software that is used as widely as Yuzu would not be easily removed from existence, especially as the source code gets archived by users in the emulation community. But the $2.4 million settlement will surely slow down the development of other emulators.

Discussion about emulators has always been a controversial topic, as emulating games in itself is already a legally questionable action, with emulators needing to decrypt the original game to allow it to be playable on their software, clearly making way for others to take advantage of the software and facilitate piracy.

On the other hand, emulation usually serves as one of the only ways to preserve games from an older generation, as big companies rarely bring more niche titles to modern consoles, leaving them at risk of disappearing unless someone emulates them.

No matter where you stand on the argument, this lawsuit has undoubtedly made a huge impact on the emulation landscape.

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