Discord Targets Emulator Devs Following Nintendo's Switch-Yuzu Lawsuit

Discord is apparently targeting Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers following the Japanese game company's lawsuit against Yuzu.

The affected Discord servers include Suyu and Sudachi and the platform has completely disabled their lead developers' accounts. Furthermore, the company is not responding to questions regarding why it went so far.

Discord Shuts Down Emulator Servers

Discord Targets Emulator Devs Following Nintendo's Switch-Yuzu Lawsuit — Discord is being criticized for shutting down the servers of two emulator devs following Nintendo's Yuzu lawsuit.
(Photo : Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV, AFP, Getty Images / Screenshot taken from official website)

Suyu and Sudachi both began as forks of Yuzu, the emulator that lost a lawsuit against Nintendo on Mar. 4, 2024. A part of the statement from Discord director of product communications Kellyn Slone said that the platform responds to and complies with all legal and valid Digital Millennium Copyright Act requests.

It added that in this particular instance, there was also a court-ordered injunction for the takedown of the materials in question. She added that they took action in a manner that was consistent with the court order.

The developers of both Suyu and Sudachi only received vague messages regarding how they were sharing content that supposedly violated intellectual property rights. On the other hand, Discord said that it was following the standard operating procedure for DMCA takedown requests, according to The Verge.

However, it was not immediately clear if there was a valid DMCA takedown request or that those communities were actually violating IP rights. Some people believe that Discord did not follow its own policy when it kicked them out of the platform.

This comes as Nintendo got Yuzu to settle rather than bring the whole case to court and it did not give the video game company the rights to the latter's freely copyable GPL v3 code. The developers of Yuzu's forks also claimed that they were changing the code, among other practices, to avoid getting on Nintendo's bad side.

It is also entirely possible that people were sharing Nintendo's cryptographic keys, firmware, or even entirely pirated games in the servers despite the commitments. But even if Suyu and Sudachi were indeed infringing, Discord's own policy does not suggest it would entail a permaban, much less a removal of the entire servers.

Nintendo-Yuzu Controversy

Jarrod Norwell, a Sudachi developer, posted an image to X, formerly known as Twitter, on Apr. 10, 2024, a discord email. In it, it was said that his account was disabled because the company found it to be in violation of its Terms of Service or Community Guidelines, said Kotaku.

This was supposedly due to sharing content that violated anyone's intellectual property or other rights. Norwell also noted that there was no other information that was provided and he claimed that Sudachi was not doing anything wrong.

While both Suyu and Sudachi are still ongoing, Nintendo has not appeared to have filed anything against either one so far. However, this does mean that the creators of the emulators will need to find another method to discuss their projects.

The situation comes as Nintendo previously claimed in February that the Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was pirated more than a million times before it was even released. It noted that this was made possible because of Yuzu, which is its reasoning in going after such emulators, according to VG247.