Tag: video games

Stardew Valley’s 1.6 Update Is Out—Here’s Some of the Biggest Changes (2024)

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The popular farming sim and ultimate cozy game, Stardew Valley, dropped a major update on Tuesday after months of anticipation. Stardew’s 1.6 update has an insane amount of new content that touches every area of the game, from new menus and DIYs, to a new farm layout, new crops, and the ability to have multiple pets and play with seven friends at once. It’s enough updates to make the game feel fresh, but isn’t so new that you can’t ease back into a beloved farm and toil away.

It’s important to note here that the free update is currently only available for PC players. The update will come to mobile and consoles like the Nintendo Switch later on. If you’re not a PC player, the 1.6 news has not changed gameplay, and you’ll be able to play normally while you wait for it to show up. If you don’t have the game yet on PC, you can purchase it on Steam for $15, and it works on PC, Linus, and Mac computers.

As soon as the PC update arrived, I opened up Stardew Valley and started a file with the brand-new farm layout (which has me very broke) to dive right in. The update also works on your existing Stardew files, and I’ve been bouncing back and forth between my brand-new file and a later-game file to see what’s new in different seasons. Everywhere I look, I see something new. Moss to forage off trees! New reactionary dialog from NPCs! A prize machine in the mayor’s house!

If you hate spoilers, I’m honestly not sure why you read this far, but you should definitely stop reading. I’m about to tell you about some of the biggest changes I’ve spotted since playing the updated game.

Photograph: Nena Farrell

Ranch Mode

The biggest change to see right away is the new farm layout. Stardew’s 1.6 update adds the Meadowlands Farm, a grass- and animal-focused design for my fellow animal ranchers. This farm grows a special blue grass that game creator Eric Barone says animals will love. It can raise animal’s hearts faster, improving the eggs and milk they give you. There’s less farming land available, and a few changes to initial quests. I’m enjoying the Meadowlands Farm so far—I immediately created one when the game dropped–even though starting with two chickens and no parsnip seeds is definitely a slower path to the infinite wealth I’m seeking. But even though I’m broke, it’s still been fun to have such a different start to the game.

Photograph: Nena Farrell

Fresh Crops

The first question my sister asked me when I started playing: “Are there new crops?” At first, I told her no. I didn’t see anything new to purchase in the shop. But there are new crops with the update–you just won’t find them in any stores.

Instead, you find four new crops (one for each season!) in a few different ways—mainly, digging them up from the ground in the game’s well-known Artifact Spots, although spots with these new crops have a slightly different style you’ll be able to spot. You can also win them in the brand-new Prize Machine in the mayor’s house, once you get your hand on a prize ticket. The new crops are carrots for spring, summer squash for (shocker) summer, broccoli for fall, and powdermelon in winter. These new crops can be used in the game’s main quest, too. Just choose Remixed Bundles for the Community Center in your starting settings.

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March 22, 2024
‘Super Mario Bros. Wonder’ Almost Had a Live-Action Mario

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Super Mario Bros. Wonder’s titular flowers can make the game Get Weird, whether it’s by changing the game’s stage or turning Mario into something slightly terrifying. One prototype idea in particular, however, would have temporarily turned the game into a live-action one.

During the development process of Wonder, the game’s team had an unprecedented amount of time to prototype its most important feature, Wonder Flowers. “At first, there were no rules on what constitutes a good Wonder effect vs. a not-so-good Wonder effect,” director Shiro Mouri said at the Game Developers Conference this week. Some were pretty simple, such as the first-year Nintendo employee who simply wrote “A Wonder Quiz Starts” on a sticky note with nothing else (that later became the game’s trivia flower). Others were more complicated and ambitious, but ultimately didn’t work with the game.

Like, for example, sound director Koji Kondo’s idea for a Wonder Flower that would have turned Mario into a live-action version of himself—a regular guy who would hum the background music and make the game’s sound effects himself.

“As an idea, it’s very funny,” Mouri said. But ultimately the idea was rejected because it was hard to see the connection between pre-Wonder flower effects, and during the live-action Wonder effect. It was also “hard to imagine the gameplay changing much by having Mario turn into a live-action version of himself,” Mouri said.

As humorous as it would have been, it also might not have gone over well with players. Long-term Nintendo fans likely still remember the ill-fated 1993 live-action movie Super Mario Bros. movie, featuring Bob Hoskins as Mario. No offense to Hoskins, but the movie was a dud (even he thought so), and cemented the idea that maybe the overalls’d plumber is better when he’s animated. (See also: The Super Mario Bros. Movie.)

Wonder Flowers, though, ended up being Super Mario Bros. Wonder’s secret weapon. Still, for every great idea, there were many left in the discard pile. More than half of the Wonder Flower prototypes didn’t make it into the final game, Mouri said, including one that turned Mario’s head into a giant block that enemies have to eat. (Developers felt Mario’s head was so large there was no strategy to avoiding enemies and the mechanic turned the game into a mad dash to the end.)

Live-action Mario didn’t get totally scrapped, though. The team liked the idea so much they modified it to create the game’s final badge: Sound Off?, which replaces the game’s usual sound effects with an acapella version. (Think: A person saying “boing” when Mario jumps, rather than the usual sound.) “It was such an interesting idea it would have been ‘mottonai’ (a waste) to not use it,” Mouri said. The voice players hear when they use that badge? That would be Kondo, of course.

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March 22, 2024
GameScent Wants You to Smell the Gunfire While You Play Video Games

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Burnt rubber and gunfire are not the most pleasing of smells, but for action games, they might be the most common. At least, that’s true for GameScent, a new device that aims to make gaming more immersive by adding smell to the equation.

GameScent, which dropped late last month to a bit of fanfare and some snickering, uses an adapter and an app on your phone to capture audio while you play. It then feeds those audio cues into the company’s “innovative AI,” which then triggers certain smells.

It’s a hexagonal device, compatible with most consoles, PCs, and virtual reality setups, built to hold six different aromas at a time. At launch, those smells are called gunfire, explosion, forest, storm, racing cars, and clean air—perhaps the most important, as it’s intended to neutralize whatever odors may linger.

“We feel like we are adding the missing link, if you will, to gaming, which is the use of olfaction,” says GameScent president Casey Bunce. Future scents the company intends to release include ocean, sports arena, and—perhaps troublingly—blood.

Bunce says that the device’s launch scents—which I’d argue are not the most aromatically pleasing lineup—were largely decided based on requests from gamers. They wanted smells to go along with action or horror games, thus all the explosions and gore.

Courtesy of GameScent

Those smells can be strong. During a demo of the GameScent at this week’s Game Developers Conference, the device, paired up with Far Cry 6, dutifully pumped out the smell of carnage and burning rubber. It’s set to a two-minute timer, meaning it won’t create a complete haze over your room every time you get into a gunfight—but it’s still better to place the unit far from your gaming perch, rather than sit near it. While its tamer options like forest are nice in a Febreeze sort of way, anyone sensitive to smell, like myself, might get a headache after a few whiffs of car stink.

GameScent’s creators say they hope to release an additional 30-40 scents in the coming year, making it easier for players to customize what they’d like their experience to smell like.

The company’s products are largely made of essential oils, which you can easily pick up at the store. When I asked what’s to stop me from dumping in, for example, my own lavender oils, a rep for GameScent told me “honestly, it would probably work. Look, you might end up clogging the thing and then you just take it out and flush it out with water.” To keep essential oil enthusiasts from using their own smells, the company plans to work with its community through an “insider’s club,” which will take feedback into account.

That being said, GameScent doesn’t plan to supply every user’s demand. “We get a lot of like—you know, X-rated requests,” Bunce says. “Very strange requests.”

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March 21, 2024
Europe’s Biggest Salt Mine Is Now in ‘Minecraft,’ and It’s Helping Ukraine Rebuild

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On February 24, 2022, Stepan Bandrivskyi woke up before dawn and got ready for a special day: his birthday.

It wouldn’t be a particularly happy one. Hours earlier, a couple dozen miles away, Russian tanks had rolled across the borders of his native Ukraine. The full-scale invasion had begun.

Like so many other Ukrainians, Bandrivskyi didn’t know what to do. So he went to work, to the Soledar Salt Mine, a cavernous state-run operation in Eastern Ukraine. Kyiv says it is the biggest such mine in Europe. His manager told him to go home: The mine was closed. It hasn’t resumed operations since.

Bandrivskyi fled the region not long after, as Russian forces advanced. After nearly a year of fighting, during which the mines were turned into bunkers, Russia seized and occupied the town of Soledar—although fierce fighting continues nearby. Over time, Bandrivskyi came to the painful realization that he may never see the salt mine, and its eerie and isolated beauty, ever again.

Last year, Bandrivskyi received a phone call from a colleague. “He invited me to participate in a very interesting project,” he says.

The Ukrainian government wanted to completely map the mine “and translate it into a game environment,” he says. Bandrivskyi seized the opportunity. “I wanted to keep it in my memory, and I wanted other people to be able to kind of immerse themselves in this world as well,” he says.

With that, Minesalt was born.

The idea for Minesalt comes from United24, the official crowdfunding arm of the Ukrainian government. For nearly two years, United24 has raised funds to rebuild apartment blocks and purchase de-mining equipment. Last year, United24 began shipping batches of salt to donors, through its “Soledarity” campaign—raising some $3 million to purchase reconnaissance drones.

But as the war drags into its third year, donor fatigue has set in. That has pushed United24 to come up with new and innovative ways of attracting the world’s attention—and support.

Minesalt, which launches today, might be their most inspired effort yet.

On the left, the Soledar Salt Mine in Ukraine. On the right, a recreation of the mine in Minecraft. (Move the slider in the middle to see a full view of each image.)

“It is important for us to remember and talk about every Ukrainian city that is under temporary Russian occupation,” Yaroslava Gres, chief coordinator of United24, told WIRED in a statement. Last summer, when a team suggested bringing Soledar to life as a video game, it was a very easy idea to say yes to.

Built for the wildly popular sandbox game Minecraft, Minesalt challenges players to race through the mine, collecting 140 hidden salt crystals as fast as possible. At the end of the run, a quiz tests players’ recollection of details from Soledar. But, like in the rest of Minecraft, Minesalt players can also opt to wander at their own pace.

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March 21, 2024
‘The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’ Initial Prototypes Were ‘Chaos’

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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s developers had a problem: the land of Hyrule kept falling apart.

Anyone who has played Tears of the Kingdom might be able to guess why. Some of the game’s big advances—Link’s Ultrahand and Fuse abilities, which allow players to create any tool they’re clever enough to stick together—required a lot of new and intricate development. Nintendo wanted to build something bigger and better with their Breath of the Wild sequel, but, as the team worked on the game, the tools that would allow players to make all those shield skateboards and log bridges broke it. A lot. It was, programmer Takahiro Takayama says, “chaos.”

During development, Takayama said he’d often hear devs exclaim “it broke!” or “it went flying,” Takayama said Wednesday at the Game Developers Conference. “And I would respond, ‘I know. We’ll deal with it later.’”

The problem was the physics of it all. “We realized removing all non-physics-driven objects and making everything physics-driven will lead us to the solution we were looking at,” Takayama said.

The second fix was to create a system that allowed for unique interactions between objects, without any specific additional needs. That meant that players who wanted to make a vehicle, for example, could tinker with many different tools instead of being restricted to something basic like a wheel and a board.

All that hardcore programming paid off. Ultrahand and Fuse are now fan-favorite tools, something players use to create flamethrowing penises and hacks used in speedruns. No matter how hard they tried, Hyrule never broke.

Those tools also meant players could solve puzzles in a variety of ways. “Regardless of what the player does, we had a world free from self-destruction,” Takayama said.

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March 21, 2024
Why Is the Slack Hold Music So Haunted and So Good?

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When Danny Simmons finished his first Slack Huddle, the same thing happened to him as did me: He didn’t hang up, the music faded in, and he went hunting for the source. Only he wasn’t looking for a random auto-playing browser tab. He was trying to figure out how a long-ago basement recording session from his old house in Toronto was piping into his ears.

Simmons is a lanky sound designer and—I truly didn’t see this coming—a mainly bluegrass musician based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He and Butterfield met back in college, when they were both in a band called Tall Guy Short Guy. (“I came in to replace the tall guy,” Simmons explains.)

After graduation, Simmons became a gigging musician and Butterfield embarked on a failed career as a video game designer. Except Butterfield had a funny way of failing. He kept trying to build games and then accidentally building the internet instead. His first, Game Neverending, never ended up making much money but did include an infrastructure for sharing photos that became the basis for Flickr. (And Flickr—with its open API, its use of tags, its social networking functions—became the basis for much of the social web.)

Flickr sold to Yahoo for about $25 million in 2005, and a few years later Butterfield tried his sorry luck again, setting out to build a lighthearted, esoteric, and surreal new game: Glitch. To do it he got the old band back together, not just from Flickr but from Tall Guy Short Guy too. Simmons came aboard to write a score—to invent a folk music for all the geographies in the game, and the requisite “bloops and bleeps and alerts.”

In Glitch, as one of the game’s developers describes it, players “planted and grew gardens and milked the local butterflies. They collected pull-string dolls of modern philosophers—including plausible Nietzsche and Wittgenstein quotations. They climbed into enormous dinosaurs, passing through their reptilian intestines and out of their helpfully sign-posted butts. It was, in a word, preposterous.”

Early on in the game, Glitch encouraged you to do certain things—like build a house or take the subway—that required permits and identification papers. To get them, you had to visit a beige room called the Bureaucratic Hall. “It was just a waiting room, a purgatory with these lizard bureaucrats walking around,” says Simmons. “They’re walking back and forth with piles of paper, and, you know, just looking busy behind their desks.”

And this, dear reader, is the phantom context of the Slack Huddles hold music; it was playing in the Bureaucratic Hall. To exit this limbo, you had to do something very precise: nothing. A timer started counting down, and if you moved your avatar at all, the counter would start over. That was the “quest.” You just had to sit still, watch the lizards work, and—can you hear that slow fade-in?—listen to the muzak.

For the waiting-room soundtrack, Simmons played the guitar and synths himself, despite mainly being a banjo guy. Through Toronto’s bluegrass scene, he knew a “really good left-handed guitar player” who dabbled in saxophone. So one day in 2012, Simmons invited the guy over to record a bunch of improvised sax fills, with instructions to make them “as cheesy as possible.”

In October 2012, Ali Rayl joined the Glitch team as a quality engineer. Just six weeks later an executive pulled her aside. He said they were shutting down the game, and he asked Rayl if she wanted to stay and “help build our next thing.” When she asked what the next thing was, the exec said it would probably have something to do with workplace communications.

As had happened before with Game Neverending, there were some pretty cool spare parts underneath all the ethereal ambitions of Glitch—like the internal messaging system the team had built. Rayl was one of only eight core people who kept their jobs in the transition to Slack. On the conference call where everyone else was laid off, Rayl felt overcome with survivor’s guilt. “I decided, I’m going to do everything that I can to support these people, to uphold their legacy and get their work out in the public sphere,” she says. And Rayl wasn’t alone in wanting to preserve Slack’s glitchy DNA.

That’s why the company came to use not just the waiting room muzak but also the “bloops and bleeps and alerts” that Simmons created for Glitch. In fact, Simmons made nearly all the sounds that Slack’s 32 million active daily users hear. That snick popopop noise that gives you a cortisol spike every time? That’s Simmons running his thumb over a toothbrush and making “that sound where you kind of separate your tongue from the roof of your mouth,” he says. There’s a phantom context for all of it.

So next time you hear the Slack Huddles hold music, remember what you have to do: Sit still. Watch the lizards. The timer is counting down.

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March 18, 2024
The Small Company at the Center of ‘Gamergate 2.0’

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“There are marginalized devs who work on these games, and they want to put that stuff in their games,” Belair says, adding that it’s strange that players feel like characters of color, for example, need to have their presence justified in any way.

“I’m a huge Uncharted fan,” Belair says.”’Why is Nathan Drake white?’ is not a thing we have to justify. He just is.”

Online, other devs at studios Sweet Baby works with have come to their defense. In a thread on X, a writer from Insomniac Games confirmed that, as consultants, Sweet Baby offers ideas, feedback, and writing. “But none of that gets into the game unless THE CORE DEV TEAM AGREES WITH IT,” the writer, who has since locked their account, posted. “Sweet Baby is not, nor is any consulting group, coming in to wreck games. They’re helping smooth out plots and deepen characters. They ease the burden on the core narrative team.”

The thread’s top response? “Get out of our hobby and take them with you.”

The harassment campaign against Sweet Baby comes as the game industry undergoes a period of immense contraction. Some 8,000 gaming industry employees have reportedly already lost their jobs in 2024. Nearly one-third of developers were impacted by layoffs last year, and there’s a growing movement within the industry for workers to unionize to protect the jobs that remain. The collective loss of talent the game industry is undergoing will inevitably have an impact on the quality of video games to come.

Yet, on the Sweet Baby Inc Detected Discord, where users often decry what they see as a decline in video game quality, there’s little care for the tumultuous year the industry has had. “I feel nothing for these developers who lost their jobs,” wrote one user.

For Sweet Baby cofounder David Bédard, that dissonance is jarring. “They love games but hate the people who make them,” he says. “They won’t get games if there’s no more people making them.”

This is true outside Sweet Baby’s ranks, too. Last year, a poll conducted by the organizers of the Game Developers Conference found that more than 75 percent of game devs surveyed believe harassment from players is a “serious” or “very serious” problem.

All this amounts to Sweet Baby becoming a scapegoat for anything players hate in games, especially as it relates to diversity and inclusion . Before, Bédard says, “they had nobody to point a finger at.”

“What they’re telling us is we’re the reason all these games are flopping. Some of these games are the most nominated or [award]-winning games from last year,” Bédard adds.

However Sweet Baby Inc Detected tries to paint the company it’s rallying against, Belair says the two have more in common than they think. “I don’t want tokenization either,” she says. “I don’t want forced diversity either.” Part of Sweet Baby’s job is to make characters more authentic and dynamic within their worlds—strong characters, she says, in the sense of how well they’re written and realized.

Frankly, Belair says, there are positive and interesting conversations to be had. “But they can’t start from this place,” she continues. “You can’t convince the conspiracy theorists. You can’t convince people who are hateful. You can’t change those minds necessarily. But at the very least, we can give other people a place to speak about what they believe, speak about their values, and to rise above it.”

Sweet Baby’s founders say that as far as the company’s business is concerned, the harassment campaign so far has been unsuccessful in interrupting their work. Their clients are supportive, says Belair, because many game studios are familiar with online abuse. Sweet Baby has been hesitant to directly address which characters or storylines it’s worked on, because Belair worries that could lead to harassment of other developers on those projects.

“You shouldn’t be sending this kind of hate to anybody,” Belair says. “If you didn’t like something, that’s just fine. Deal with it. Don’t buy another [game] if you don’t want to, but you don’t need to launch a whole campaign about it.”

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March 14, 2024
Aerith’s Fate in ‘Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’ Is Causing a Rift Among Fans

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There’s no more important death in video games than that of Final Fantasy VII’s flower girl, Aerith. In the 1997 game, Aerith meets her end at the hands of Sephiroth, who brutally stabs her in front of the game’s hero, Cloud Strife, and by extension the players.

It was a permadeath that stayed with fans. “I felt it was imperative for us to show the gravity and rawness of loss,” Tetsuya Nomura, the game director who has worked on several Final Fantasy titles, including this year’s Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, recently told The New York Times. It was a formative moment for many players, who remember the scene beat for beat, including the moment its iconic musical theme kicks in. When Square Enix announced it was remaking Final Fantasy VII in a trilogy of games, fans braced themselves to watch Aerith die all over again, rendered in more modern, more real graphics—until the game offered up a twist: in-game phantoms called whispers and the ability to possibly stand against fate.

In other words, when Final Fantasy VII Rebirth hit consoles late last month, players were faced with the possibility that Aerith could be saved—or that Square Enix might be about to pull off the biggest troll in history.

(Spoiler alert: Major spoilers for Aerith’s fate in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth to follow. No, really, the whole scene, spoiled.)

Rebirth’s recreation of the series’ most infamous scene starts out familiar. Cloud approaches a kneeling Aerith in the Forgotten Capital, where she’s run off to pray for a way to defeat Sephiroth. Cloud, overtaken by Sephiroth’s influence, nearly kills her himself. When that fails, Sephiroth appears from the sky, comically large sword in hand, to shish-kebab everyone’s favorite flower girl.

For a moment, Aerith’s fate seems locked into the same one gamers knew so well in 1997—until Cloud breaks free and deflects the blade at the last minute. It falls harmlessly to the side, and Aerith lives.

Or so it seems, until the scene begins to glitch between moments of Aerith unharmed, and then bloodied in death. What?

From there it only gets more confusing, as Rebirth evokes a multiverse it has been playing with throughout the entire game. When the cast finds Cloud and Aerith, it’s clear they’re seeing their friend slaughtered. Cloud, long established as an unreliable narrator, still treats her as though she’s alive—and she plays the part well, presumably as some sort of specter.

Reaction to this scene in online fan communities has been one of great bewilderment. “Why make it so complicated?” wrote one Redditor in a post asking for an explanation to the ending. “What was even the point?” wrote another in the thread.

Square Enix’s twist on Aerith’s death also means that the scenes following her murder play out much differently. In the original Final Fantasy VII, the game’s cast individually mourns Aerith—Red XIII howls in sorrow, Tifa gently pats her hair, and so on—before Cloud carries her out to the lake and lets her sink into the water. It’s these scenes that drive her death home: There is no magic cure, no plot twist that can help her. She’s just gone.

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March 10, 2024
Makers of Popular Switch Emulator Yuzu Agree to Pay $2.4 Million to Settle Nintendo Lawsuit

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The makers of Switch emulator Yuzu say they will “consent to judgment in favor of Nintendo” to settle a major lawsuit filed by the console maker last week.

In a series of filings posted by the court Monday, the Yuzu developers agreed to pay $2.4 million in “monetary relief” and to cease “offering to the public, providing, marketing, advertising, promoting, selling, testing, hosting, cloning, distributing, or otherwise trafficking in Yuzu or any source code or features of Yuzu.”

In a statement posted Monday afternoon on the Yuzu Discord, the developers wrote that support for the emulator was ending “effective immediately,” along with support for 3DS emulator Citra (which shares many of the same developers):

We write today to inform you that yuzu and yuzu’s support of Citra are being discontinued, effective immediately.

Yuzu and its team have always been against piracy. We started the projects in good faith, out of passion for Nintendo and its consoles and games, and were not intending to cause harm. But we see now that because our projects can circumvent Nintendo’s technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy. In particular, we have been deeply disappointed when users have used our software to leak game content prior to its release and ruin the experience for legitimate purchasers and fans.

We have come to the decision that we cannot continue to allow this to occur. Piracy was never our intention, and we believe that piracy of video games and on video game consoles should end. Effective today, we will be pulling our code repositories offline, discontinuing our Patreon accounts and Discord servers, and, soon, shutting down our websites. We hope our actions will be a small step toward ending piracy of all creators’ works.

We Admit It

The proposed final judgment, which still has to be agreed to by the judge in the case, fully accepts Nintendo’s stated position that “Yuzu is primarily designed to circumvent [Nintendo’s copy protection] and play Nintendo Switch games” by “using unauthorized copies of Nintendo Switch cryptographic keys.”

Though the Yuzu software doesn’t itself include copies of those Nintendo Switch cryptographic keys, the proposed judgment notes that “in its ordinary course [Yuzu] functions only when cryptographic keys are integrated without authorization.” That means the software is “primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing technological measures” and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, according to the proposed settlement.

While that admission doesn’t technically account for Yuzu’s ability to run a long list of Switch homebrew programs, proving that such homebrew was a significant part of the “ordinary course” of the average Yuzu user’s experience may have been an uphill battle in court. Nintendo argued in its lawsuit that “the vast majority of Yuzu users are using Yuzu to play downloaded pirated games in Yuzu,” a fact that could have played against the emulator maker at trial even if non-infringing uses for the emulator do exist.

Not Worth the Fight?

The Yuzu Patreon currently brings in about $30,000 a month, making a $2.4 million settlement a significant expense for Tropic Haze LLC, the US company set up to coordinate those Patreon donations for the emulator’s development. But in the proposed settlement, the Yuzu developers say this figure “bears a reasonable relationship to the range of damages and attorneys’ fees and full costs that the parties could have anticipated would be awarded at and following a trial of this action.”

The potential attorneys’ fees necessary to fully bring the Yuzu case to trial likely played a significant role in the quick settlement in this case. As attorney Jon Loiterman told Ars last week, “Unless Yuzu has very deep pockets, I think they’re likely to take [the emulator] down, and the software will live on but not be centrally distributed by Yuzu.”

Yuzu’s developers also faced some relatively distinct allegations of aiding and acknowledging potential Switch pirates through various communication channels, including bragging about successfully emulating leaked Switch games before their release date. “I’ve personally experienced how strict most emulator communities/discord servers/forums are regarding copyright and piracy, so it’s really weird to me that Yuzu devs wouldn’t be like that,” emulator developer Lycoder told Ars last week.

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March 5, 2024
Nintendo Sues Makers of the Wildly Popular Yuzu Emulator

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“Whether Yuzu can get tagged with [circumvention] simply by providing instructions and guidance and all the rest of it is, I think, the core issue in this case,” he continued.

In a response on the Yuzu Discord, the development team wrote, “We do not know anything other than the public filing, and we are not able to discuss the matter at this time.”

What About My Backup Copies?

In its lawsuit, Nintendo argues that “there is no lawful way to use Yuzu to play Nintendo Switch games.” But that statement has a few potential holes that could serve as possible defenses for the emulator maker.

For one, the US Copyright Office generally allows users to make copies of legitimately purchased software for archival purposes, with a few basic caveats. Accessing such personal archival copies would potentially be a legal use for an emulator like Yuzu.

Nintendo goes directly after this argument in its lawsuit, arguing that buying a Switch game only means you “have Nintendo’s authorization to play that single copy on an unmodified Nintendo Switch console.” Any other copy is, by definition, an “unauthorized copy,” Nintendo says, even if it’s made by the original purchaser for their own personal use.

What’s more, Nintendo argues that using Yuzu as a way to play legitimate Switch purchases on another platform (e.g., an Android device or Windows machine) is also forbidden. “Nintendo has the right to decide whether or when to enter the market of games for platforms other than its own console,” the company writes.

In this, Loiterman thinks Nintendo’s arguments probably go too far. “Nintendo wants to say that the license agreement for all users restricts their use of the game to only run on the Switch,” he told Ars. “That’s problematic because the 37 CFR § 201 includes a number of exceptions and limitations on how far-reaching and applicable licensing terms like that can be.”

Homebrew and Accessibility

Yuzu defenders could also point to the emulator’s ability to run a wide variety of homebrew Nintendo Switch games and software, ranging from weather-tracking apps to an obligatory Doom port. Running this software through Yuzu is a legitimate use that doesn’t require breaking Nintendo’s encryption or software copyrights.

In its lawsuit, though, Nintendo argues that “the vast majority of Yuzu users are using Yuzu to play downloaded pirated games in Yuzu.” For instance, the lawsuit points to data showing that leaked copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom were downloaded 1 million times in the week and a half before the game’s release, a time period that also saw “thousands of additional paid members” added to Yuzu’s Patreon. Yuzu is “secondarily liable” for “inducing” this kind of infringement, Nintendo argues.

Inducement arguments aside, the presence of some legal homebrew uses could help Yuzu here. “We have plenty of objects that can be used in either legal or illegal ways that are not illegal to own or use,” attorney and game industry analyst Mark Methenitis told Ars. “Lockpicks, for example, have perfectly legitimate use cases as well as illegal ones, and we don’t restrict ownership of lockpicks … But these are the balancing acts a finder of fact has to consider in the context of all of the arguments presented.”

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February 29, 2024