Nintendo just DMCA'd every Switch emulator (again), but it's not over yet

After shutting down Yuzu and Ryujinx last year, Nintendo has been surprisingly hands-off when it comes to the many forks that cropped up last year. That period of peace has now come to an end, with the company sending DMCA notices to literally every Nintendo Switch emulator and fork that’s currently hosted on GitHub.

The notice was sent yesterday and includes Eden, Citron, Kenji-NX, and MeloNX, as well as projects that are no longer active, such as Sudachi and Skyline. As of writing, the repositories are still online, but it likely won’t be long before they are removed from the website.

Switch emulation development saw a major resurgence early last year, with Yuzu forks like Citron and Eden picking up where the Yuzu team left off after it was abruptly shut down by Nintendo. Yuzu, being open-source, has always been open to new teams creating forks with new features, but these projects were far more organized than early efforts like Suyu.

Nintendo’s argument for taking down Switch emulators has always related directly to the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs), which include cryptographic keys in the console itself that are used to decrypt games. Neither Citron nor Eden bundles these keys with the emulator, with users required to mod their own consoles to import their own keys and firmware.

It also asserts that Switch games can only be legally played on official Switch hardware. Again, none of these emulators bundle ROMs or provide guidance on finding or downloading copyrighted content, yet the mere fact that they can play pirated content is a point of contention for Nintendo’s legal team. The Yuzu case, which was settled out of court, didn’t provide a ruling on the legality of emulation, so these claims are largely untested.

This isn’t the first time Nintendo has targeted emulators hosted on GitHub, so most projects have taken steps to prepare for a potential shutdown. Switch emulators in active development like Citron and Eden have duplicated their repositories and hosted them on private servers, so it will be virtually impossible for Nintendo to scrape them from the web entirely.

However, it can make them harder to find, potentially exposing users to malware from sketchy sources. For now, you can follow the latest releases on the official websites for Citron, Eden, and Kenji-NX, but whether or not this is just the start of a wider crackdown on Switch emulation remains to be seen.