Nintendo Kills Off The Popular Switch Emulator Ryujinx

Another blow to emulation and preservation

Nintendo, the company behind 25 of the best selling games of all time, has shut down another popular Switch emulator - Ryujinx. Earlier this year, Nintendo won a lawsuit against the developers of the Switch emulator Yuzu, claiming that the developers had illegaly circumvented the devices encyrption, and that the emulator’s ability to play games, especially the recently released Tears of the Kingdom, caused irreparable harm.

For Ryujinx, a lawsuit appears to have been avoided after Nintendo came to an agreement with the emulator’s creator, GDKChan. Per a message on the Ryujinx Discord server, GDKChan was contacted by Nintendo and agreed to remove Ryujinx and all associated assets from Github. Accessing the Github page for the emulator now leads to a 404 error.

The litigous zealotry of Nintendo has risen in recent years, causing actual irreparable harm to those in the company’s crosshairs. Gary Bowser, a former member of the hardware hacking group Team Xecuter, was found guilty of fraud and in a separate civil lawsuit, agreed to pay Nintendo $10 million in restituition. Bowser, who is now 54, will have his wages garnished for the rest of his life. And considering the average life expeteancy of people, and the average salary of someone in Canada, Bowser will most likely die before even a fraction of that money is paid back to Nintendo.

But hey! Nintendo said it causes them irreparable harm. Just look at Metroid: Dread, a game that reportedly ran better on emulators than it did on the Switch. It ended up becoming the best selling installment in the franchise’s history. But what about Tears of the Kingdom? Didn’t Nintendo say that the game was illegally downloaded over a million times? I guess that’s pretty bad considering it only sold a mere 20 million copies as of June.

Personally, I don’t give a damn why someone uses an emulator. Whether or not you use it for piracy doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of the health of Nintendo’s business, because it’s quite literally impossible for pirates of Nintendo games to have any sort of dire impact on them. The amount of people who pay for games outnumbers the amount who don’t by 10 to 1. And as Tim Cain would say - You’re not going to lose a sale if you never would have had a sale.