this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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It will. The nature of the project will shift from a core team like Yuzu had to a decentralized process. If they avoid the legal pitfalls that killed Yuzu (like donations) then there's little to nothing that Nintendo can do legally.
There's already a project forked from Yuzu called Suyu that has a ton of activity on it. To me it looks like all the external contributors have jumped on to that new project and are working on removing all references to Yuzu and they will continue the work.
The dev process has absolutely been temporarily halted and significantly slowed down, but it's not going to stop.
It happened within 24hrs of the news.
The binaries for Yuzu and all the tutorials still exist. Everything that has worked on Yuzu until now will continue to work forever. The news has simply increased awareness to the average person that you can play Switch games on a computer. People who otherwise would never have known about it.
And all of this completely ignores another still existing Switch emulation project that was just as capable as Yuzu that has existed for just as long.
So yes, it is ABSOLUTELY going to have the opposite effect. At the very "best", Nintendo won an empty victory.
Yes the project can continue. The original developers, who were obviously best suited to continue it, are gone. I'm sure suyu can do a good job, but I just don't see how you can call it a positive.
I don't know who the suyu contributors are, but so far all the activity was renames and migrations to GitLab, not a single technical commit. Are any of them actually able to work on a Switch emulator? Maybe they are, I genuinely don't know, but the activity on the project so far doesn't indicate that.
You say the binaries and tutorials still exist. I wasn't interested in Switch emulation before this, but wanted to try out of curiosity when this happened. I'm a developer myself, and it was difficult finding information. All the download sites and tutorials are dead, and sketchy alternate downloads cannot be trusted. How is the average person, as you say, supposed to download Yuzu now? I eventually got it running but it was far from easy and I had to view tutorials through archive.org. Again, not impossible, but far from the "opposite effect". Access to Switch emulation for the average person was lowered.
Well, for one thing, I never said it was a positive. I didn't use that word, nor did I even imply it.
Look at LibreOffice. It was forked from OpenOffice and it has far outpaced OpenOffice to the point that it's embarrassing that OpenOffice is still being developed. Just because the original core devs are gone means nothing in the long run. Switch emulation isn't some black magic secret project that only a handful of people know how to do. The biggest hurdle is always the DRM portion, which has long since been cracked. The rest is basic dev stuff.
And in any case. There is another project that's been around as long as Yuzu and is as equally capable and performant.
This statement literally proves my point.
The binaries still exist in some repos, like the Arch extras repo.
You are saying it's going to have the opposite effect of what Nintendo wants (curtailing emulation), so your claim is that this is going to make emulation more widespread. Correct me if I misunderstood.
I never disagreed that a fork can end up good. I said Yuzu shutting down won't help emulation.
Your claim was that this is "increased awareness to the average person". How are you mixing "average person" and "Arch extras repo"? The average person uses Windows, Googles "yuzu" and doesn't find anything clear. This was my point, it brought awareness to me and I saw myself that Yuzu is no longer accessible to the average person.
Please explain how Nintendo is worse off now if that's really what you think. All your arguments boil down to "this means nothing in the long term, emulation is going to be fine", which I agree with. I still don't see how this is having "the opposite effect" though.
You're intentionally conflating two separate points I made.
Point #1: the fact that you went out of your way as a result of the lawsuit news to download and try Yuzu proves my point that more people will try it out.
Point #2: the binaries are still available in some of the usual places. For example, it's still available in the Arch repos.
Those two concepts aren't directly linked together. And I decided to check out the Suyu progress and they're making much more than just README and branding changes. They'll have binaries available soon also.
And like I keep saying, Yuzu wasn't the only Switch emulator out there. So even if people can't find Yuzu, they can find the other one which is very much active and available to use. It's called Ryujinx, btw. It's a terrible name, but it works.
Yes I'm conflating them to illustrate my point. You are right in that it will increase the amount of people wanting to try it. My point is that these people won't be able to get it running, if, for example, it involves Arch repos which are far beyond the reach of the average person. So the additional awareness might go nowhere.
You say Suyu will have stuff soon, and that there are alternatives. Yes that's correct, which to me means "emulation is not dead yet, there are still alternatives", which doesn't seem like "the opposite effect" at all.