Discord has shut down the servers for two major Nintendo Switch emulators.
As reported by The Verge, Suyu and Sudachi, two emulators that were forked from Yuzu, have revealed to the public that their Discord servers were taken down. The developers for these emulators received messages confirming they were shut down for violating intellectual property laws, but did not elaborate further.
The Verge received this statement from Discord product communications director Kellyn Slone:
“Discord responds to and complies with all legal and valid Digital Millennium Copyright Act requests. In this instance, there was also a court ordered injunction for the takedown of these materials, and we took action in a manner consistent with the court order.”
As The Verge explains, Nintendo’s settlement with the Yuzu developers required those developers to stop work on Yuzu. Alongside that, one of the developers was also working on 3DS emulator Citra, and he had to end work on it too. But Nintendo did not get the rights to the emulators Yuzu and Citra themselves.
This is the reason Suyu and Sudachi exist in the first place. In the strange world of video game emulation, developers may choose to follow some rules and laws, while also violating others. In this case, Suyu and Sudachi have a legal right to exist, since Yuzu’s code is open source. As emulator forks, Suyu and Sudachi share a lot of code with Yuzu, but their developers are free to make changes to the code as they wish, as they are now branded with different names. On the side, yuzu, suyu, and sudachi are all real names of a few lesser known citrus fruits.
It’s easy to assume that Nintendo lawyers used scare tactics to make Discord take this action, but there’s actually another possible reason. As The Verge points out, while Suyu and Sudachi are both perfectly legal, their Discord servers might be hosting things like cryptographic keys, the same issue that Nintendo brought up for Yuzu, or even video game ROMs.
There is a possibility that Discord isn’t following the rules that it laid out to users when it comes to server bans in this situation. But, we also need to remember that as a privately owned enterprise, Discord is under no obligation to provide their services to everyone.
While we discuss possibilities, it has to be said that we may never find out the reasons for these bans. Nintendo generally has a policy to not discuss these legal actions unless there are attached legal obligations to disclose them. Consequently, we can’t really make Nintendo or Discord reveal the reasons if they don’t want to.
In the end, maybe Nintendo just wants to discourage emulation development, for a platform that they are still actively selling. They can be labeled evil for doing so by some gamers, but the truth is, they have every right to protect their source of livelihood, no matter how much money they have already made, or how many or few people are actually pirating their games.
But then again, in spite of all the circumstantial evidence, what if Discord did this all on their own and Nintendo didn’t even know? As I pointed out, it’s unlikely we’re going to learn everything about this at all, unless either party talks.
