Less than a week after initiating a lawsuit against an American publisher of an emulator, a program that lets you play console games freely on a phone or computer, Nintendo announced Tuesday that it had reached a settlement and dropped the lawsuits.
After negotiations with Tropic Haze, a company based in Rhode Island (Northeast) that develops and distributes Yuzu, a particularly popular emulator, Nintendo announced that it had reached an agreement for $2.4 million according to a document seen by AFP.
According to the agreement, Tropic Haze “agrees to judgment in favor of Nintendo and agrees to pay the amount of $2.4 million in favor of Nintendo” to cover damages and legal costs.
This agreement in no way prejudges the decision of the Rhode Island state courts to which Nintendo appealed, but Tropic Haze has already committed not to appeal this decision.
Yuzu was originally designed to play games linked to previous Nintendo consoles. According to the Japanese company, Yuzu now offers access to games on its current console, the Switch.
An emulator is a small computer program that can be downloaded to a computer or smartphone and allows you to play games originally intended for consoles such as Switch, PlayStation or Xbox.
Emulators were originally designed to play games that were no longer released on the latest consoles, before “vintage” gaming became its own market for Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft as well.
However, you can now mostly play the latest games that have been released on current console models.
According to the Japanese giant, Tropic Haze bypasses the complex encryption and protection measures that Nintendo implements in each of its games to then make them available to Yuzu users.