This idiot brought this on himself AND is probably at least partially responsible for the recent crackdown on Switch emulation by Nintendo. I won’t shed a tear for him.
Not to defend leakers even a bit and Nintendo has every right to go after them legally. However, the emulation crackdown is just Nintendo flexing their legal team on small devs who’ve done everything they can to discourage leaks from spreading within their limited reach. It’s 100% on Nintendo and they themselves are acting in a legal gray zone to bully 3rd parties into giving up. If any of the emulation teams had the resources to simply deal with big N, the situation would probably look a little different.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, yes leakers are in the wrong but no, they didn’t kill emulation with their actions even when it provoked Nintendo.
Small caveat:
The first switch emulator that was taken down (I think yuzu), was justified by Nintendo as copyright infringement because people (including moderators) were sharing copyrighted material openly on their public discord. BIOS files, links to games, and early leaks.
The more recent one (Ryujinx I think) was the one that did things right, so Nintendo didn’t have that copyright leg to stand on. So instead (according to the maintainer of the Mac fork) they sent goons to the house of the head dev in Brazil… to “talk” him into taking it down.
Wow, this is kind of thing that can make one reevaluate what methods are most appropriate when dealing with corruption and oligarchs.
Wait, they sent people to their house? What the fuck? Are they a video game company, or the mob?
Yes.
You could ask the same thing of Wizards of the Coast who sent goons to a guy’s house over some Magic The Gathering cards.
We live in an age where these two things are becoming interchangeable.
It was literally the Pinkertons. Long-time union infiltrators.
God we really are beyond fucked, aren’t we?
Yeah this guy seems like an idiot and there’s no moral high ground here. Nintendo can have him
Look, Nintendo is bullshit, bullying innocent creators for stupid, paranoid reasons… but c’mon. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
