Nintendo takes down over 8,500 uploads of the Yuzu Switch emulator

Earlier this year, Nintendo successfully managed to shut down the Yuzu emulator. As a result, many spin-offs of the Nintendo Switch emulator appeared. Now, Nintendo is hoping to shut all of those down too, sending over 8,500 takedown requests to GitHub, where many copies of Yuzu were being stored.

As reported by PC Gamer, the Microsoft-owned Open-Source repository site, GitHub, has taken down a whopping 8,345 repositories, all of which were housing copies of the shuttered Yuzu emulator.

Yuzu shut down earlier this year, with the developers also being forced to pay out a hefty fine to Nintendo, in part for copyright infringement and in part for commoditising the emulator through a very successful Patreon campaign.

In Nintendo's takedown notice it said “the reported repositories offer and provide access to the Yuzu emulator or code based on the Yuzu emulator”, so copycat versions of Yuzu aren't safe either.

The big thing that pushed Nintendo over the edge was the fact that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was pirated over a million times before the game had even launched on Switch. Many of those downloading the leaks used the Yuzu emulator to play.

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KitGuru Says: With GitHub being the largest site for open-source code hosting, and with it being a Microsoft-owned company, the thousands of copies of Yuzu uploaded there were never going to be safe from takedown. Nintendo will no doubt be keeping an eye on GitHub in the months ahead too for re-uploads. 

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