Nintendo Takes Action Against Emulators and Pirates Ahead of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Premiere

Just before the premiere of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (released on May 12), Nintendo went to fight against pirates. It has been two weeks since a copy of the game leaked onto the Internet. The Japanese company is therefore cracking down on repositories and discussion forums and asking operators to delete links leading to downloads.

In addition, she also shed light on applications that make it possible to play Switch games even without a console. That is, for emulators and secondary tools. They got it Lock pick, Lockpick RCM and other offshoots that disappeared from GitHub at the company’s request. Lockpick is used to extract decryption keys from the Switch, thanks to which emulators can then run games from the obtained ROMs (also extracted from the Switch, but more often downloaded from the Internet).

Due to concerns about possible legal action from Nintendo, development ended overnight Skyline emulator for Android. Previous versions can still be downloaded and the whole project is open source, so it will definitely be continued by someone, but temporarily it is a big loss for the community.

There are two other emulators for the Switch, Yuzu and Ryujinx, which work on Windows, macOS and Linux. They are resisting Nintendo so far and nothing changes in the development.

Today, Switch emulators are at such a level that most of the games that have arrived on the platform work in them. And since computers and modern mobiles have much higher performance than Nintendo’s consoles, games can run there even better than on the Switch. Thanks to support, they can even be improved in terms of content or functionality.

Nintendo has been fighting against emulators of its platforms (even older ones) for a long time. He has a problem with copies of even 40-year-old games that can no longer be legally purchased. The court case with the hacker group Team Xecuter, which broke the protection of the Switch, was followed by a lot of attention. The head of the team, Gary Bowser, ended up in jail and heavily fined for this. However, the fact that he sold hacking tools for the Switch worked against him.

Source: Simon Aarons, Ars Technica