Nintendo Goes Nuclear On Switch Emulators With 400+ GitHub Takedowns

Nintendo is doing it again, taking furious legal action against Switch emulators. We've covered previous examples of this, back when Yuzu was targeted in March 2024 and the open-source Ryujinx followed in October 2024.

Open-source Nintendo Switch emulator development took over after the original "big two" were taken down, but the biggest of them by far was "Suyu," which contained a full network of 311 repositories. At least, it did before Nintendo sent its latest DMCA takedown notices on GitHub, citing how emulation software enables piracy by bypassing the encryption protecting Nintendo Switch games from unlicensed copy and play.

Besides Suyu, six other repo networks were hit with DMCA takedowns recently. This includes the Android-based Skyline and Yuzu Android, which totalled 29 and 8 repositories, respectively. NicolasArvani's Yuzu fork and its 14 repos were struck, as well as IpwnedU's Yuzu fork, which had no additional repos. Finally, exverge-0's Yuzu-EA4176 and its 21 forks were also DMCA'd, along with irlbunny-archive's C#-based MonoNX and its 17 forks.

It's a hell of a sweep from Nintendo, but keen eyes may notice that most of the emulators hit by this wave were based on Yuzu, which was taken down two years ago now. Yuzu and Ryujinx were both very far along in development by the time Nintendo came knocking, rendering virtually the entire Nintendo Switch library playable or near-playable on PC before the original developers were forced to stop working on them. New forks of Suyu and the like will emerge in only a matter of time.

As TorrentFreak muses, new Nintendo Switch emulator forks may reappear faster than Nintendo's takedown notices can get rid of them. For Nintendo Switch emulation, it would seem that the proverbial genie is out of the bottle and Nintendo's legal team is now tackling a hydra. Individually, none of these projects can defeat Nintendo in court, but as long as the software survives to be distributed and re-forked, they don't need to.