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Nintendo may have just won its battle to put the most popular Nintendo Switch emulators out of business. In March, it sued Yuzu out of existence<\/a> \u2014 and now it may have convinced Yuzu\u2019s primary competitor, Ryujinx, to go away too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cYesterday, gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and offered an agreement to stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets he\u2019s in control of,\u201d writes developer and moderator ripinperiperi on Discord<\/a>. \u201cWhile awaiting confirmation on whether he would take this agreement, the organization has been removed, so I think it\u2019s safe to say what the outcome is.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The rest of ripinperiperi\u2019s message is a eulogy for the project, including a pair of videos showing the Ryujinx team\u2019s progress on iOS and Android ports of the Nintendo Switch emulator, among other core changes \u2014 ones that will now presumably never ship. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Nintendo would not confirm or deny to The Verge<\/em> that it made a deal with the developer. Instead, Nintendo spokesperson Eddie Garcia mysteriously pointed me to the Entertainment Software Association\u2019s head of public affairs Aubrey Quinn \u2014 who said she couldn\u2019t speak on behalf of Nintendo. I guess I got the runaround. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Compared to Yuzu, Ryujinx was thought to be relatively untouchable. Rumor had it that lead developer GDKChan was based in emulation-friendly Brazil, though I never found proof of that when reporting on the plight of the emulator world<\/a> earlier this year. Certainly, we never heard about a lawsuit against Ryujinx, nor did Nintendo go after its Discord server<\/a> or DMCA its GitHub<\/a> as we saw with other Switch emulators. (GitHub does currently not show a DMCA takedown request for Ryujinx, by the way.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n While emulators are technically legal in a broad sense, there\u2019s nothing preventing Nintendo from filing lawsuits that indie developers cannot afford to fight<\/a>, filing DMCA takedown requests, or simply putting pressure on organizations like Discord and GitHub to pull things down themselves. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n There are even legal theories that suggest Nintendo could <\/em>win a case if it went to court \u2014 not because emulators are illegal, but because of the other copy protection mechanisms in the Switch and the argument that some of these modern emulators are trafficking in piracy. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n