The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was downloaded over 1 million times ahead of release

Tropic Haze, the company behind the Yuzu emulator, is being sued by Nintendo. Yuzu has existed for a number of years already without issue, so what was the straw that broke the camel's back? Well, that would be the mass piracy of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. 

Tears of the Kingdom launched last year after several delays and achieved great critical acclaim and went on to be a top seller. However, the game did also leak ahead of release. As part of its lawsuit against the Yuzu emulator, Nintendo revealed that it estimates that the game was downloaded and played over one million times prior to release.

“Defendant and its agents are fully aware of the use of Yuzu by others in performing circumvention, and in facilitating piracy at a colossal scale”, the lawsuit filing reads. “As to circumvention, Yuzu's website acknowledges that the Nintendo Switch's decryption keys (prod.keys) are required to decrypt games and includes links to software that unlawfully extract those keys from the Nintendo Switch”.

On the piracy side, the lawsuit filing states: “one recent major Nintendo video game, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, was unlawfully distributed a week and a half before its release by Nintendo. Infringing copies of the game that circulated online were able to be played in Yuzu, and those copies were successfully downloaded from pirate websites over one million times before the game was published and made available for lawful purchase”.

Yuzu itself has also showcased Tears of the Kingdom running within the emulator.

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KitGuru Says: Nowadays if you see a Switch game on a torrent site, it usually comes with a link to download Yuzu, or it comes packaged with a version of the emulator. That may be ultimately what caught Nintendo's attention here, alongside Yuzu's very lucrative Patreon account, which has over 30,000 paid subscribers. 

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