Tears of the Kingdom's cart was ripped and uploaded to the internet somewhere about ten days before its official May 12th, 2023 release. One of Nintendo's sticking points in the lawsuit that led to Yuzu's shutdown was that they developed an emulator capable of playing this leaked version, but it's important to note that Yuzu did not publish any version of their software (mainline or early access build) compatible with Tears of the Kingdom until the game released. The only way to play it before launch was with the Ryujinx emulator or a recompiled-from-source-code version of yuzu with patches and fixes made by third party developers. Out-of-the-box Yuzu could not run the game until May 12th.
Quick caveats before we dig in:
- What's done is done but I find emulation history fascinating and seeing something that's categorically untrue become part of the story in realtime is really wild.
- I did a lot of research into this when it was happening and most of the information was in subreddits that have since been banned.
- I'm not gonna morally opine on how Yuzu was wronged, or that leaks are good or bad, again I just find this shit really interesting - I also believe emulation is key to preservation and steps taken to harm it are a net negative.
Anyway before you're like 'woah there, but people DID play the game before release using Yuzu, right?'
the answer is '...sort of!'Yuzu's source code was open which meant the current version's code could be downloaded, compiled, edited and re-released without Yuzu's team ever having been involved. Third party developers created their own versions of Yuzu from the source code with various 'homemade fixes' in order to make the software run the game. This started a whole series of 'dirty' versions of Yuzu shared around on piracy subreddits and 4chan. Some were possibly legit, some were just viruses. It got so ridiculous that PC Gamer wrote an article mentioning the 'Belarus virus panic'.
Hell, I remember just by looking at /r/yuzu, Reddit suggested to me a post from one of the Yuzu piracy subreddits despite not having been subbed there with a detailed guide on how to download the .xci, get beyond the intro TotK cutscene in a beta build of Ryujinx emulator, then port the save file over to a hacked recompiled version ("totally virus free!! pls ignore that it originated on 4chan it's legit") of Yuzu to play the rest of the game.
Here's a wayback machine archive of a few of these subreddit's front pages from around release, you can see people scrambling to try to make it work and post their own fixes.
/r/NewYuzuPiracy
/r/yuzupiracy1
Couple of things about Yuzu itself
Yuzu's business model was brazen, they had a patreon making upwards of 30k USD a month for development costs of the emulator (which - no shade, get your bag but it's wild when you consider the financial grey area emulation usually exists in), and one of the benefits of the Patreon was 'early access' to builds. It's also important to know that Yuzu's team was incredibly vocal about their anti-piracy stance in theory and in practice:- All piracy discussion in the subreddit was banned
- Tech support in their discord required uploading logs from Yuzu which could detect if the emulator was using pirated software
- If the devs did any work on the emulator to make it function with unreleased games, they did not publish it ahead of time. Not even the early access builds could play unreleased games unless the game would have already run on the emulator as-is. This again, was not the case with Tears of the Kingdom. Extra work had to be done by third parties (and after release, the Yuzu team) in order to get the game functional with the emulator.
Now about these "yuzu piracy" subreddits that popped up - there were so many, dedicated to teaching people ways to circumvent copy protection, links to product decryption keys and effectively compiling all of the resources one would need to play a switch game on PC without ever having touched a switch. They regularly had posts of people combing through the pushes and changes on the Yuzu early access github to see if the devs were working on fixes for ToTK behind the scenes before release. They weren't.
Some of these subreddits thrived for a while, others were shut down - almost every one that I researched during the pre-release period was banned from Reddit within a month or two of the game's release. It's muddy on if this part is true or not but the prevailing theory is that Yuzu's team started taking action to get these subreddits shut down.
Pineapple was a group that took the source code from Yuzu's early access Patreon builds and put them up on Github for anyone to download. We can get into the semantics of taking the publicly available code from a paywalled project and releasing it, but their goal appeared to be 'getting the EA builds out to people without them having to subscribe to the Patreon'. Many guides leading up to the game's release involved downloading an EA build from Pineapple and then injecting code from a file a random reddit user (or 4chan user depending on how early) had provided in order to get the game to work. Shortly after one of the Yuzu piracy subreddits was shutdown, Pineapple added the following text to their github page (web archive):
Due to recent concerns about the Yuzu team, we recommend that you use Ryujinx instead.
So where does this put us?
Who fucken knows. I think Yuzu was doomed the moment their patreon blew up because their success was a sniper dot on their head, regardless of their 'good, anti-pirate intentions'. The switch also being such an underpowered device that it's got games that have release-day emulation at a higher framerate didn't help this whole thing. In the past, emulation's trailed behind by about a console generation and I think Nintendo's been antsy since Cemu made Breath of the Wild a better experience than a Switch back in 2018.Again - would the 'they didn't actually publish a working version pre-release' be a defense in a lawsuit against a corporate juggernaut with infinite legal resources? Especially when the other charge was that the software facilitated piracy on a 'colossal scale'? I don't think so, but I do think it's important for other emulator developers to note that even if you do take a fervent anti-piracy stance and try to 'play within the rules', you're still going to be blamed if the copyright holders decide to try to come for you, and history will erase the steps you used to 'try to do it right' when you get bodied.
