Ryujinx Switch Emulator Project Shuts Down Under Nintendo Pressure

Open source Nintendo Switch emulator Ryujinx has thrown in the towel under pressure from Nintendo. Lead developer 'gdkchan' was reportedly contacted by the gaming giant on Monday. He was given the opportunity to stop working on the project and shut down everything under his control, presumably to avoid further action. The project's repo on GitHub has already been deleted.

ryujinx-gone-s When a Nintendo lawsuit targeted the people behind the Yuzu emulator in February, leading to its shutdown just a few weeks later, dark clouds appeared over the future of Switch emulation.

With momentum on its side and tacit acceptance of its core claims via settlement agreement with Yuzu, Nintendo targeted key software tools underpinning emulation of its copyrighted games. Takedown notices eliminated dozens of repos containing tools designed to provide access to Switch encryption keys, those who linked to similar tools were targeted too.

Ryujinx Alone in the Wasteland

As Nintendo systematically removed thousands of code repositories attempting to keep Yuzu’s public profile alive, an important player in the emulation scene continued seemingly intact.

Launched in 2017 by developer ‘gdkchan’, open source Switch emulator Ryujinx began life as an ARM64 emulator and now runs on Windows 10/11, macOS and Linux-based systems.

Continuously developed over the past seven years by a core team, assisted by dozens of contributing developers, Ryujinx was made available via a GitHub repo under an MIT license and was funded by donations. The reasons for Nintendo not targeting it sooner are unclear but on Monday, everything changed.

Ryujinx Given an Opportunity to Agree With Nintendo

In a Discord post subsequently posted to the official Ryujinx ‘X’ account last evening, development team member ‘riperiperi’ suggests that Nintendo outreach on Monday amounted to an ultimatum. The gaming giant and its lead developer could agree on a course of action to end the project, or presumably other options would be explored.

“Yesterday, gdkchanwas contacted by Nintendo and offered an agreement to stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets he’s in control of,” the announcement reads.

“While awaiting confirmation on whether he would take this agreement, the organization has been removed, so I think it’s safe to say what the outcome is. Rather than leave you with only panic and speculation, I decided to write this short message to give some closure.”

The post goes on to thank everyone who contributed code to the project, the moderation team, and all supporters throughout the emulator’s development.

Immediate Effect On Emulation Project

At the time of writing the official project homepage remains up, but there doesn’t appear to be an official notice or explanation. Importantly the download page has been wiped clean while links to other pages hosted in GitHub now return 404 errors.

The reason for that is the disappearance of the entire project from GitHub and with it all repos, code, and related history. There’s no DMCA takedown page due to the approach taken by Nintendo and the subsequent response; voluntary deletion of the project.

Content that remains intact includes the Ryujinx account on X, plus accounts on YouTube and Patreon.

The project’s Discord channel is also operational, at least for now. It has 100,665 members of which 22,059 are currently online.

What happens next, if anything, is hard to predict. The decision to comply with Nintendo’s offer is controversial, as these things usually are. For some the disappointment was inevitable following the shutdown of Yuzu; for others, this is a battle to be fought to the bitter end.

That’s much easier said than done but since this is an open source project, someone may still decide to bring Ryujinx back to life. Nintendo, of course, is already watching.