Another Nintendo Switch emulator has shut down

By Carli Velocci Published October 1, 2024

Cloud saves, which are supported through Nintendo Switch Online — Nintendo

Another day, another Nintendo console emulator that has ceased operations. A developer at Switch emulator Ryujinx announced on its Discord that it’s shutting down.

The message, shared to X (formerly Twitter) by video game news aggregator Wario64, says that the lead developer on the project, known as “gdkchan,” was contacted by Nintendo and told to “stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets he’s in control of.” Nintendo also offered some sort of agreement, although the terms are unknown.

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Apparently gdkchan didn’t reveal to at least developer “riperiperi,” who posted the statement, what he decided, but all download links have been scrubbed from the website. At the time of this writing, the Github directory has been archived and is now read-only.

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“Thank you all for following us throughout the development,” riperiperi wrote. “I was able to learn a lot of really neat things about games that I love, enjoy them with renewed qualities and in unique circumstances, and I’m sure you all have experiences that are similarly special.” You can read the full statement below.

Looks like Ryujinx (Switch emulator) is dead pic.twitter.com/gE1qH30Axs

— Wario64 (@Wario64) October 1, 2024

Rumblings that something had happed to Ryujinx, an open-source Switch emulator written in C# that worked across Windows, macOS, and Linux, began Tuesday morning. Subreddit users noticed that the app stopped working, Github was returning an error, and any download links had vanished. Some theorized that the Github had been hacked or that there was a fixable issue, and other Discord messages seemed to confirm it wasn’t on account of Nintendo legal action.

Ryujinx isn’t the first Switch emulator to get taken down after Nintendo reached out. Competitor Yuzu settled with Nintendo in March, agreed to pay a sum of $2.4 million, and was shut down. Nintendo originally sued the developers for infringing on its copyright (or the DMCA) and for facilitating piracy of Tears of the Kingdom. Nintendo also recently sued the developer of open-world survival game Palworld for infringing on multiple patents, although it didn’t disclose what those patents were.

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Contributor, Games

Carli is a technology, culture, and games editor and journalist. They were the Gaming Lead and Copy Chief at Windows Central…

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