The Switch turned seven years old yesterday, making it one of the longest-running video game systems in Nintendo’s history. There have been reports that it still sells so well, Nintendo has delayed introduction of a successor machine to 2025 in order to build up a software launch library. They can afford to take a slow approach. People won’t stop buying Switches!
The question is, then, if the Switch still sells well, then how much of a threat were unofficial emulators like Yuzu? That doesn’t really matter because it’s no longer a going concern — the developers were slammed with a lawsuit late last week. A settlement was reached and announced this morning. They’ll stay out of court by handing Nintendo $2.4 million (far below the lawsuit’s asking price) and ceasing development of Yuzu.
Though multiple court cases have declared emulators legal, Yuzu went over the line in a number of ways that made litigation possible. Nintendo has never met an unofficial emulator it actually liked, but this one was really taunting the bull. In addition to running software the company just put on the market, Yuzu was partially for profit, locking its beta features behind a paywall that a Patreon subscription would make available. Doing so made Tears of the Kingdom playable on Yuzu the day of its release (or even before). That was enough ammo for Nintendo to load its bazooka.
There are other ways to make sure this doesn’t happen to your product that don’t involve suing your fans. Notice how there are no emulators for the XBox Series X, or the Playstation 5. Heck, it was only recently that a good emulator showed up for the Playstation 3. This is because those systems are on the technological edge and can’t yet be recreated with other hardware. The Switch, by contrast, launched with chips that were dated back in 2017.
But bleeding-edge graphics haven’t been the strategy for Nintendo in a long time and probably won’t be with the Switch 2. Why would they? Graphics didn’t help the Gamecube 20 years ago, and then the strategy of going half-backwards with the Wii to stuff it with other gimmicks paid off handsomely. The price they pay for this is easy emulation of their current on-the-market systems, something that’s unlikely to stop even after Yuzu shuts down.
