Comment by gjsman-1000
2 years ago
The profit has nothing to do with it. Bleem! was profit driven by design, for example. (Bleem! is also irrelevant being decided before the DMCA provisions came into effect.)
Is it a smart idea? No; but a profitable emulator should be just as legal as an unprofitable one. But where it involves breaking digital locks, as Nintendo may successfully demonstrate, the DMCA makes both illegal.
I think the bigger issue is that they were using a leaked copy of TOTK to develop their emulator and the Yuzu developers didn’t want that to come up in discovery so they settled
I would say the risk of Nintendo - or, really, any company - caring about an emulator goes up with the amount of money the devs are making from it.
In this case, insult was further compounded because of a prerelease leak of a Legend of Zelda title _and_ charging for early access to an update to make it playable with Yuzu.
That Yuzu reportedly has generally better performance than a Switch console couldn't have helped, either.
Making money and credible potential to eat into sales. A less litigious company would still have complained.
> That Yuzu reportedly has generally better performance than a Switch console couldn't have helped, either.
What does that even mean? I think you mean: "the fact that yuzu could be run on hardware that allowed it to perform better than a switch console".
Emulation, by it's very nature, will always perform worse. But the underlying hardware could be significantly better.
> _and_ charging for early access to an update to make it playable with Yuzu.
From my understanding, this part is not true (though it is widely touted).
There were third parties that made the necessary fixes to run the game in their own forks, but Yuzu proper did not release any fixes until after the game came out, even in the pre-release versions.