Nintendo is suing the creators of the popular Switch emulator, Yuzu, claiming Tears of the Kingdom was pirated 1M times.

In the lawsuit, Nintendo claimed that the creators of Yuzu have used their tech to illegally circumvent Nintendo’s software encryption and in turn, facilitate piracy.

The company now seeks damages for the alleged violations while also pushing for a full shutdown of the emulator and any domains related to Yuzu.

According to Nintendo, for any game to be brought from the Nintendo Switch to the Yuzu platforms, the creators must first obtain the product keys from a hacked console, and then make at least one unauthorized copy of the Nintendo Switch game, violating both the DMCA and Copyrights Act respectively.

They also claim that Yuzu’s actions have facilitated piracy on a colossal scale, as the creators themselves are fully aware of others using Yuzu to circumvent software protection. Yuzu’s website has also been accused of providing links to software that illegally extracts the decryption keys from Nintendo Switch games to circumvent its protection.

It is worth noting that the lawsuit also mentioned that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was unlawfully distributed a week and a half before its release, citing that infringing copies of the game were playable on Yuzu and that the illegal copies were downloaded over 1 million times before the official release.

Nintendo claims that many of the pirating websites have explicitly stated that the pirated copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom can be played on the emulator. This shows that Yuzu has contributed to more third parties to infringe the copyrights of Nintendo.

Emulators have always been a heated topic among the gaming community, with arguments both for and against the software. But for now, we can only wait and see how the lawsuit will ultimately conclude.