After the shutdown of the Yuzu emulator, Discord could be threatened by Nintendo for taking down the servers of developers who aspire to be Yuzu’s successor, and the developers have also been hit by the banhammer.
The Verge reported that two emulator developers have been banned from Discord. One is Suyu, which we have been following, and the other is Sudachi. The servers were wiped and the developers were banned. The developers are in a kind of gray area after Yuzu reached an out-of-court settlement with the big N (halting development of the emulator and making it unavailable, ditto for the 3DS emulator Citra developed by the same team; substantial compensation). The site understands that the Yuzu-Nintendo agreement means that developers not affiliated with the original team can use and modify the open source GPL v3 code for their own development…
According to a Discord spokesperson, they respond to all DMCA claims and have a court order to remove the requested content. In other words, the big N has not taken kindly to these two emulators, and they will stop emulating Switch anyway. (So far, they have not found a way to stop Ryujinx, another long-running emulator). Discord’s servers are not as encrypted as Telegram or Signal. One Reddit user suggested that a Discord server might not be the best place for such a project.
However, the only thing Nintendo achieves is that the more emulators it tries to kill, the more publicity it gets, and the more people will try to develop them. More and more projects can be started, and eventually the capacity of the big N will be exhausted. And 3DS games (like Wii U titles) can no longer be legally purchased from the eShop, as the online services for both platforms have been shut down. If something was only released digitally, it can only be emulated if you don’t have the game on your console.
Nintendo is also against game preservation.
Source: PCGamer, The Verge, Reddit
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