I wrote up a bit of what crossed my mind on the whole Yuzu/Nintendo thing over on CoHost but there have been some additional bits that have come out since my initial analysis.

The Yuzu devs were bringing in at least $40k/month from their Patreon, according to one source I’ve talked to, and I’m inclined to believe it from his lips since he’s been in the “scene” for a very long time and has been doing better in keeping up on the world situation since I’d stopped paying close attention about ten to twelve years back.

That isn’t to say I didn’t keep up on emulation at all, but I had a lot of other things to be focusing on, including the massive rewrite to the MAME documentation back in 2013. That said, that part is off-topic, so let’s get back on track.

As I expected, two forks of Yuzu were announced almost immediately. One has already shut down. I don’t know if it was from legal threats or if they just decided to work with the other fork that was announced at the time. Either is fairly likely, to be honest.

I think that there will be a substantial bit of whack-a-mole going on with Yuzu derivatives, and Nintendo’s heavy-handed handling of this is going to result in a massive resurgence in piracy on Switch– Nintendo’s classic stance of “all emulation is piracy, period, end of story” is the exact same kind of thought process that has pushed movie and TV watchers back into piracy (and the price increases inherent to streaming services going up so sharply hasn’t hurt)

As Valve has said in the past, piracy tends to be a service problem. If you provide content at reasonable prices, people will buy it. If you don’t provide certain older content, they’ll find ways to get it anyway, legal or otherwise.

Of course that goes right back to the preservation concept.

I can name a handful of games right off the top of my head that will never get a rerelease for various reasons. Bionic Commando on NES is a pretty solid example; due to one scene at the end of the game involving the exploding head of Hitler, it would be forced to be rated M by today’s standards and Capcom has minimal interest in trying to get it okayed for any sort of Virtual Console-type release as a result.

Until recently, a whole boatload of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games were in a similar situation for a different reason: the copyrights for the various titles were held across at least THREE different corporations that were absolutely NOT going to be able to come to terms that would be acceptable to all of them for rerelease. Somehow the stars aligned to allow for it, but I would absolutely not suggest you take that as a sign it’ll happen again any time soon with any other copyrighted materials.

Until very recently, pirates were the major source of obtaining the actual material for rerelease in the first place, as the developing and publishing companies have had minimal interest in keeping copies of their old material around and often have completely lost or destroyed source code and other materials related to these games.

There have been Steam rereleases of various older games that actually included scene-cracked executables due to the publisher no longer having access to a non-protected version of their code to republish on Steam.

So, there’s something of a moral need for pirates to some extent; proper preservation can never be fully legal. It’s a very grey area that requires a lot of nuance, and it’s taken me years to develop the lines that I use for what I’d consider morally acceptable– I’m not interested in putting programmers, artists, and musicians out of business either, after all.

— Firehawke