Why doesn't Nintendo's lawyer army go after Dolphin when it went so aggressively after Yuzu? Is it just because Gamecube/Wii are EoL'd so they don't care as much (vs. Switch which is still actively supported and selling games)
Others in the thread have already made good points about Yuzu, but to add to the discussion: A lot of people think Nintendo is indiscriminate with their takedowns, but they typically only go after things that:
* They think will significantly hurt their brand (or already has)
* They think will significantly hurt their bottom line (or already has)
An interesting case study on this is in 2006, before the launch of the Wii, Nintendo issued removal of certain NES ROMs from popular ROM-sharing websites. Rather than removing all Nintendo ROMs from those sites, Nintendo specifically provided them a list of the NES games that were slated to launch on Wii Virtual Console. I'm struggling to find a source for this, but I distinctly remember it happening because there were some odd inclusions like Wario's Woods, while Super Mario Bros. 3 remained untouched. If anyone is good at searching old news articles, I would really love to have a tangible source for this memory of mine.
Pretty sure that one happened because the release effectively went viral, with a lot of mainstream tech/gaming websites covering it. Still, as a retrocomputing enthusiast, it's hard for me to be an apologist over that one.
As I understand it, Yuzu was backed by an actual company that they setup to process their "donations", and by getting donations you could get privileged access to new builds.
So for Yuzu there was an legal entity making money off (Nintendo argued) selling access to playing pirated games.
Dolphin doesn't accept donations, so there's no good way of arguing anyone is making any money off it. Sure, Nintendo could go after individual contributors to Dolphin (if they can find out exactly who they are - presumably many of them are aware of the risks and try to stay anonymous) but it would be costly and it's unlikely to yield any positive results.
The main thing that took them down was that when Tears of the Kingdom leaked a week early, the Yuzu developers made a special build available exclusively on Patreon that was able to run it, actively marketed its ability to play a leaked game copy on their YouTube and socials, and in some cases actively pointed people to where they could find a pirated copy for themselves on their Discord server.
Nintendo could have sued them into oblivion at any time (as the court documents show, they had been stepping over the line for a long time), but chose not to. If it wasn't for the Tears of the Kingdom thing, Yuzu would probably still be around today.
The main TLDW: Yuzu was reaping huge income and bragged about delivering at-launch support for major Nintendo Switch games, thus directly diverting paying customers from Nintendo. The other major aspect was Yuzu was facilitating encryption key distribution which is how Nintendo was able to bring forth a legal attack.
Yuzu was taking donations to support playing games that were leaked before release.
Nintendo did ask Dolphin to pull out some DVD keys so it’s not like they’ve been left alone either.
But Nintendo doesn’t care about emulation because that’s settled legal precedent . It cares about whether the emulation is being advertised to bypass DRM for piracy. Dolphin doesn’t cross that line, yuzu did.
This is from what I remember. I can't provide any proof because it's just from glances at the Yuzu Discord.
From what I recall, the Yuzu dev team (or at least some members) kept a private "stash" of pirated Switch games on a private Discord server and constantly used it to talk about Switch piracy and the like.
If the lawsuit progressed, it would have come out in discovery. Not a good look.
This explains why Nintendo went after Yuzu but not Ryujinx, which employs the same decryption mechanisms as the former.
* They think will significantly hurt their brand (or already has)
* They think will significantly hurt their bottom line (or already has)
An interesting case study on this is in 2006, before the launch of the Wii, Nintendo issued removal of certain NES ROMs from popular ROM-sharing websites. Rather than removing all Nintendo ROMs from those sites, Nintendo specifically provided them a list of the NES games that were slated to launch on Wii Virtual Console. I'm struggling to find a source for this, but I distinctly remember it happening because there were some odd inclusions like Wario's Woods, while Super Mario Bros. 3 remained untouched. If anyone is good at searching old news articles, I would really love to have a tangible source for this memory of mine.
On the other hand, the worst takedown I've ever seen Nintendo make was when they issued a C&D against a brilliant Commodore 64 port of Super Mario Bros.: https://www.eurogamer.net/nintendo-takes-down-mario-bros-c64...
Pretty sure that one happened because the release effectively went viral, with a lot of mainstream tech/gaming websites covering it. Still, as a retrocomputing enthusiast, it's hard for me to be an apologist over that one.