Sadly and perhaps somewhat surprisingly Nintendo is now the owner of the Ryujinx emulator. In yet another blow to the Emulation community, Nintendo seems to have acquired the domain associated with the emulator.
Nintendo has killed off two significant Nintendo Switch emulators this year, and DMCAd several forks. This means that playing Switch games on anything other than a Nintendo Switch is becoming increasingly more difficult. The folks at NintendoWire reported that as of November 7th, 2024, Nintendo of America was listed as owning Ryujinx.org. This change seems to have first been spotted by XeClutch who shared it on Reddit.
This may seem strange, but it’s likely an attempt to restrict further distribution attempts. The team involved with Ryujinx have been rather quiet regarding this change although there had been speculation that the lead Developer may have come to some form of agreement with Nintendo.
While this is standard practice for Nintendo, it’s unlikely that it will stop the spread of emulators and forks thereof. There are still several places where the emulator or a variant thereof can be found. It’s not the only route that Nintendo is taking to curb emulation though. Nintendo is currently in a legal battle with a Streamer over blatantly pirating unreleased software on stream and sharing download links with his stream viewers. This only hurts the ethical emulators out there as it sets legal precedents in favour of outlawing emulation. As a result, Nintendo is claiming that linking to an emulator is illegal, read more here.
