Although the developer is suspending his work for family reasons, it’s actually 100% the big N that made him decide to do so.
Pizza Emulators made it possible to run Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games on Android. However, it disappeared from the Google Play Store on Friday. The Verge reported what Pizza Emulators developer Davide Berra wrote in a post on Discord. He decided to stop developing emulators to focus on his family instead of apps.
He didn’t mention the out-of-court settlement between Nintendo and the Yuzu emulator developers (the Switch emulator team had to pay $2.4 million to the big N, plus they had to remove the emulator from the Internet, which is useless), but surely the Japanese company sent him a nice sounding, very threatening message because he could have left the emulators on the Google Play Store and he simply didn’t update them.
Although the removal of a popular emulator for Nintendo Switch favors rival Ryujinx, another project by Yuzu developers, the Citra emulator, which was used to run Nintendo 3DS games, was also wiped, even though the platform’s eShop is no longer functional (it’s been defunct since March 2023, so you can’t buy games digitally since then, which were mostly eShop exclusive…), and we’ve written before about the unfairness of what Big N is doing to emulator developers in terms of game preservation.
Nintendo is trying too hard to protect its own intellectual property while also making disposable games. Super Mario Bros. 35 is a case in point: the Mario battle royale was only playable for six months, and in April 2021 the big N will shut it down, rendering it unplayable. There would be a demand for it, even though they took the concept from Tetris 99 (like Tetris 99, where everyone played a particular map independently).
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