Nintendo Goes After Switch Emulation With Aggressive New Takedowns

Polygon RSS Feed✍ Elijah Gonzalez📅 August 21, 2026⏱ 2 min read(about 3 hours ago)

Overview & Key Takeaways

Nintendo just took down over 400 GitHub repositories for Nintendo Switch emulators after issuing a DCMA notice.

Nintendo seems dead set on snuffing out Switch emulation. As reported by TorrentFreak, Nintendo recently filed several DMCA notices against Switch emulator repositories on GitHub, resulting in the removal of over 400 Nintendo Switch emulator-related codebases from the site. Specifically, these DMCAs were targeted at the emulators Suyu, Skyline, and Yuzu.

In 2024, Nintendo settled with Tropic Haze, the company behind Yuzu, for $2.4 million. As part of the settlement, Tropic Haze was ordered to stop developing the emulator and remove its code from its official repository. However, because the software was open-source, developers forked the code, which eventually evolved into a successor emulator, Suyu. As for the Skyline emulator for Android, the developers shut down the project in 2023 after pressure from Nintendo.

Nintendo has argued that emulators like Yuzu and Suyu encourage piracy by circumventing the company’s “technological protection measures” (TPM). Nintendo’s TPMs are a form of encryption embedded in the Nintendo Switch console and in video game files to “prevent users from unlawfully accessing and copying Nintendo Switch games."

Nintendo argues in its DMCA takedown order to GitHub that these emulators encourage piracy and that they “illegally circumvent Nintendo’s TPMs in order to run illegal copies of Nintendo Switch games.” Essentially, Nintendo states that these emulators get around the company’s proprietary means of encryption, and that to work these emulators “necessarily use unauthorized copies of these cryptographic keys to decrypt unauthorized copies of Nintendo Switch games, or ROMs, at or immediately before runtime without Nintendo’s authorization.”

In the takedown notice, Nintendo cites the previously mentioned settlement with Tropic Haze, as well as another case against content creator Jesse “EveryGameGuru” Keighin, who streamed pirated games before release. Neither case was challenged in court. The Tropic Haze case ended in a settlement, and Nintendo won the case against Keighin by default after he stopped responding to the company and reportedly destroyed evidence. Nintendo previously reached an out-of-court agreement with the Switch emulator Ryujinx to take that project offline. Nintendo aggressively litigated against Nintendo Switch piracy, at one point suing a Reddit mod who promoted pirated games for $4.5 million.

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