Nintendo has allegedly shut down the Nintendo Switch emulator Ryujinx.
In the Ryujinx Discord channel yesterday, developer and moderator ‘rip in peri peri’ claimed that the Japanese company contacted the team and offered “an agreement” to shut down the emulator, which it later accepted.
“Yesterday, [Ryujinx creator] ‘gdkchan’ was contacted by Nintendo and offered an agreement to stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets he’s in control of,” ‘rip in peri peri’ said.
The download page on the Ryujinx.org website is currently blank, and the GitHub page for the project has been taken down. This suggests that the emulator was removed almost immediately after the agreement was finalized.
The Discord announcement continued, with ‘rip in peri peri’ revealing that the team had a working iOS port “that ran really well” behind the scenes, but it remained a novelty due to a lack of tools, like UI, so wasn’t released.
There was also a working Android port, which did have a UI, but it wasn’t in a state to be released due to performance and accuracy issues.
Ryujinx’s reported takedown comes just a few months after Nintendo shut down another emulator, Yuzu following a short civil lawsuit.
The company sued the creators for “facilitating piracy on a colossal scale”. It alleged that Yuzu had broken copyright law, arguing that the emulator was “primarily designed” to evade the encryption of the Nintendo Switch.
Nintendo and the Yuzu creators agreed to settle the lawsuit later.