https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1762576284817768457/
"NEW: Nintendo is suing the creators of popular Switch emulator Yuzu, saying their tech illegally circumvents Nintendo’s software encryption and facilitates piracy. Seeks damages for alleged violations and a shutdown of the emulator.
Notes 1 million copies of Tears of the Kingdom downloaded prior to game’s release; says Yuzu’s Patreon support doubled during that time. Basically arguing that that is proof that Yuzu’s business model helps piracy flourish."
The legality of the emulation itself has long been established, but I’ve been concerned for a while that illegal DRM circumvention of the games themselves has been a viable legal avenue. Under the DMCA, even the process to dump your own legally-licensed games has arguably been in a legal grey area for a while now, with how they are locked down. If any method to playing the games become illegal, any unauthorized emulation of games becomes de facto illegal.
I’d cite legal precedent here, but there’s been a substantial right-wing, pro-corporate shift in American courts over time. Who knows how this will go.
I have a .zip containing the latest early access version of Yuzu, for Windows and Linux. It includes the emulator, all required decryption keys, the latest firmware for game compatibility, a tool to automatically download mods, and a convenient guide on how to acquire ROMs.
I will forever distribute this .zip in a non-limited download link to anyone who asks me. Forever. You can PM me today and I’ll send it, you can PM me in 5 years and I’ll send it. Please feel free to do so. It’s not illegal to share where I live, so I’ll share. But do it via PMs, as to avoid causing trouble to the community.
Again, forever. If you’re reading this in the future, unless I’m dead (my mental health is a bit shaky), I’m sending you a fully functional Yuzu pack.
Have a nice day.
What is the auto-download mod tool you are referring to?
YuzuModDownloader will detect games in your library, check the built in repositories, download the mods and apply them automatically. Do keep in mind it enables all mods by default, so make sure to go to the game’s settings and disable the ones you don’t need.
Are these mods to improve things like stability and performance? I’ve found I can only use Yuzu to test out games because it’s impossible to put any real time into them due to crashes.
Some allow you to enable better graphics than the native version, some can downgrade graphics to improve performance. Some remove framerate limits. Some are cheats, with infinite health and similar. It varies a lot, really.
For example, with Tears of the Kingdom on a Steam Deck there are mods to make the game run at 16:10, with better performance, and better frame pacing at 30 FPS. If you’re running it on a PC, there are 60 FPS mods with improved draw distances and shadow resolution.
Pretty sure I saw your comment in a Reddit thread about this. You’re doing good work. Stay strong, legend.
I had no interest on playing switch games, but I do have a problem with authority overstepping. I’ll help you stick it to the man and evangelize more people on the ways of the Corsair. Pm’ed
I would be super interested! Though I’m not sure how to DM from mlem lol
Hey man, hope your mental health improves. I’m not quite safe for myself without my anti depressants so I know how that goes.
Keep your chin up.
Pm’d and thank you.
Please on me this, and stay strong with the mental health. Seeking help is important and recognising you need it is the first step.
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So fuckin what? Doesn’t mean you need to be a dick about it
Sorry, didn’t mean to create this impression. You’re correct - there are mirrors of the official GitHub, other sites hosting it, pre-built binaries being shared on Internet Archive and Discord. You can find Yuzu, and you can probably do so from websites you already know and trust. The keys and firmware are a bit harder for newcomers (which is why I include them in the pack), Google is filled with junk when you search for those, but if you’re already a member of certain communities or have a hacked Switch, you can obtain those easily too.
But I do keep this updated pack that I use when a friend needs it or I happen to format a new PC. It’s already clean, already features the keys and firmware, and I know I can trust it (I built it after all hehe) so I might as well share. Maybe in the future Yuzu links will be harder to find or filled with crapware, mine will not. Maybe Yuzu will win the court case and be distributed on Steam… That’s great! I’ll probably still keep my pack, you never know with these things.
I basically share everything I have, if somebody wants it. Rarely is my copy the only one or somehow special. I believe the single “rare to find” digital piece of media I own is an .iso backup of a brazilian CD-ROM child’s game. But seriously, I don’t attribute much thought to rarity or importance or my name when sharing these things, I just want people who want Yuzu to have Yuzu.
Hey, Kadu! I was having the hardest time trying to find your comment on multiple apps after seeing it on the web version of Voyager. Now, after finding you, I can’t even DM you on any of the three that I use so I am resorting to commenting here in the hopes you’ll be able to see me and hopefully DM me the link for your zip! If you do see this, thank you so freaking much, and I and many other really appreciate you doing this solid! 😁
I just PMed you :)
Dmed you!
Kudos to you for helping out others. 🙏
Pmed and also dropping in the comments for mental health solidarity. Here for you friendo ❤️
I have forked everythjng yuzu in hopes of preserving the source code it’s availible here: https://github.com/F0SSC0RE?tab=repositories
I wouldn’t trust the fork to remain on GitHub. When yt-dl was taken down GitHub got most.of the forks iirc
Yea I should host it elsewhere
PMed you, hope you’re doing okay buddy. :)
Hello, I would be greatful if I can do what you said I can do.
I strongly hope and wish you feel better.
If you send me this (I pm’ed ya) I will be happy to keep this torch aflame as well.
I’m sorry to hear that your mental health is shaky at the moment. I hope things get better for you soon, friend.
Hang in there, friend, there any many more Nintendo games coming that we must enjoy through piracy to stick it to Nintendo, don’t leave just yet.
Thanks! May we all enjoy gaming together :)
Ily.
♥️🥰♥️
can you send it to me aswell
Would you consider posting the SHA256 of the download so future pirates may cross reference with this comment thread? Y’arr.
Good idea!
SHA256 (.zip): 81c3101348abff9eb7ca55bdb14464eb4b1011d288b3285c91a013a62a1fea94
SHA256 (most recent download link): 120288a5781e23f2c4767c6448a33f2803ab1d45943301441315aa20b78c7fc5
This is such a dope move, I appriciate your efforts! Thanks for helping the community :)
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Decrypting these doesn’t seem to work for me, any idea why?
It’s a hash, not anything encrypted.
Sorry, I don’t smoke. No, not even in code form.
Hello kind soul, please share that with me. Was never able to make it work due to lack of keys.
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Yuzu actually even took steps to make the emulator NOT run pirated versions of the new Mario game before it officially released. I ran it on Ryujinx like a week ahead of its release date, but Yuzu literally refused. They insta-banned anyone who talked about it.
What’s more, is that from these passages, it sounds like Nintendo even wants backups of games you have lawfully purchased to constitute copyright violation and made illegal (because they have to bypass encryption, therefore violating DMCA). I’m not fluent in legalese though, so correct me if I’m misinterpreting:
Ah corporate Lawyer BS, pointing out what they want to be true and not pointing out the other. ROMs are legal under existing Copywrite laws under archival laws in the USA (117) and backup laws in Canada (29.24). The Americans have a bit more of a restricted way of using their archives, but that’s not needs to be argued here, as it appears that Nintendo is blaming Yuzu for actions of the general consumer. It’ll be like blaming your Network provider for allowing a user to download a movie, both legally and illegally, thus they should be punished for both actions.
I also love that Nintendo isn’t not stating it’s illegal here, just that it’s infringing because it’s not authorized.
Nintendo is blaming Yuzu for actions of the general consumer
If you read the dmca, that’s something you can do. Making tools that enable others to break copyright protection is specifically disallowed. Which is why it’s one of the more insidious copyright laws
However, the thing is that Yuzu doesn’t do that. Yuzu doesn’t include any form of tooling that breaks encryption, facilitates ROM dumping or offer downloads of Nintendo Copyrighted software. They aren’t facilitating it, the user has to provide all of that chain of the emulation on their own. Hopefully this would be obvious to a judge.
Yuzu doesn’t include any form of tooling that breaks encryption
You cannot state that with certainty. That’s the problem.
Yuzu does indeed include a method to use the Switch’s production keys (which you must dump yourself) to decrypt the games. Whether this constitutes effective DRM is not a question that can easily be answered and must be decided by a court on a case-by-case basis.
This will be what the case will hinge on: Is Ninty’s scheme effective DRM?I would say no because symmetric encryption with a publicly known key may aswell be no encryption at all but that’s not my decision to make.
They aren’t facilitating it, the user has to provide all of that chain of the emulation on their own.
Um, no. The emulator is doing the decryption on its own. All the user does is provide the prod keys and unmodified ROM.
Yuzu itself doesn’t provide tools to dump keys and Roms from the Switch. The user has to procure them, or the means to dump them, themselves. Thus Yuzu doesn’t facilitates DRM circumvention. The user has to solve that part on their own. They do provide guides for how to do it on their website. But Yuzu themselves don’t make or distribute the tooling, and Yuzu the software is incapable of doing it.
The dumps are just that: Dumps; 1:1 copies.
The tools don’t decrypt anything; that happens within Yuzu. Why else would users need to provide the prod keys to Yuzu?
To dump the keys, third party tools rely on DRM circumventing sploits. You essentially have to hack your own device, certain versions of Switch and certain software updates are no longer susceptible. But it remains that Yuzu doesn’t do any of that. Those tools and sploits were developed by others.
it decrypts games using your console keys though? i’ve seen mention of that in their docs so i’m not sure, but yeah if it does that, it’s similar to things that decrypt blurays. feasibly against the dmca because of how broad the dmca is.
It’ll be like blaming your Network provider for allowing a user to download a movie
Which, by the way it was recently ruled in the US that ISPs can’t be punished for that. article source
I remember a video of SomeOrdinaryGamers talking about a case where a company (I think it was Nintendo) was arguing that making a copy of games you own yourself should be illegal. The whole case was just that. Probably something from the last 4 months or so.
Anyway, regarding 124, a judge with a working brain would say “There’s nothing here stating that it was Yuzu who allowed, or facilitated, anyone to obtain said reproductions.”
- The copies were not obtained through Yuzu. Yuzu is not a site where the roms are, or even links to any of them. Sure, it exists solely to emulate nintendo’s current hardware, but that’s not the problem.
Sigh. If only law and justice worked based on factual evidence and logic, instead of interpretative contortionism…
These passages imply the writers of them lack basic computer literacy and don’t even understand Nintendo’s own systems.
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“copied the game ROMs into Yuzu” Yuzu is not a VM or other container and the ROMs are simply stored on disk in their original dumped form… Yuzu doesn’t “store” or “contain” any games.
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“any copy not on an authorized cartridge” LOL! What about games downloaded from your own digital marketplace, then?
What about a game you downloaded from Nintendo eShop and stored on an external SD card, which is a standard and well supported storage method on Switch? Is that SD card an “authorized cartridge”?
The authorized cartridge thing would hopefully be ignored due to several other times Nintendo tried to stop developers like Tengen from bypassing their licensing system and developing their own carts for the NES (you know those weird ones that were usually blue or black? Those were “illegal” in Nintendo’s eyes but they lost every single case they took against them to try and stop them from being made).
“copied the game ROMs into Yuzu” Yuzu is not a VM or other container and the ROMs are simply stored on disk in their original dumped form… Yuzu doesn’t “store” or “contain” any games.
ROMs are indeed copied “into Yuzu”. They must be loaded into Yuzu’s memory in order for Yuzu to execute their code or render their assets. In copyright law, even loading something to memory constitutes a “copy”.
Also, almost every emulator is a VM; do you think those ARM instructions are running on your x86 processor and its desktop OS kernel natively?
I thought Yuzu was actually a dynamic recompiler? I remember this practice started in the days of N64 emulation, and these tools are more like debuggers than like VMs. So in this case, ROMs may only be copied “into Yuzu” byte by byte, not stored as a block in memory. At this point it’s really semantics, but that’s what the lawyers are supposed to figure out, right?
Unlike older emulators, Switch emulators don’t even support saving the emulator state, and their savegame data is stored right on the native filesystem. I believe they are actually more like Wine, and remember, Wine Is Not an Emulator.
Yuzu does recompile some parts during runtime by using a JIT, but the rest is still emulated.
You can’t compare them to Wine, since Wine acts as a compatibility layer by translating OS specific calls, but it does not translate between instruction sets.
Thanks for clarifying, I only have a casual knowledge of Yuzu internals and had been led to believe the ARM was translated rather than emulated.
The performance is honestly incredible for software emulating a different instruction set.
It says “not on an authorized cartridge or console”, the latter would cover legitimately downloaded games. Agree on the other points though.
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Cool, so you’ve outed yourself as someone not 100% against racial slurs. If Nintendo was a black-owned company, would you have done the same?
No judgment either way, just info:
This spells “xiao riben” in Chinese. To anyone not familiar, this is derogatory Chinese slang for Japanese people, basically meaning “little Japanese person”. English speakers would use the term midget or runt. It hails back to WWII, when it was commonly believed that the Japanese were smaller than the Chinese.
Shit like this is why I moved away from Nintendo for my gaming platform of choice.
But take heart, Nintendo, I’ll try to make time to enjoy Nintendo first party games later on a pre-loaded cheap Chinese knock-off device.
Except, I definitely won’t because Nintendo will definitely succeed in stuffing the genie back into the bottle, and preventing their games from being enjoyed on un-approved platforms in un-approved ways. /s
Maybe they should have named it Ryujinx or something else that sounds less phonetically like “you sue”
18 million copies sold and they’re pulling this bullshit. Fuck Nintendo at this point.
They could have sold 19 million copies though. Won’t someone think of the billion dollar corporations?
I feel like a large number of the people pirating wouldn’t have bought the game even if it was their only option. Then there’s people who pirated and bought the game both. Unrealized profit is not the same as losing money.
Yeah I don’t have a switch, and I’m not about to start it when the second one is near us.
I think the majority of these is people just downloading it to see if it works for 2 hours and never touch it again lol
But the IP lobby sucessfully got that idea to the courts. In my country if you are caught torrenting a series episode just for 10 seconds, the courts accept the idea, that you spread like a hundred copies of the IP to people who would have definetely bought it otherwise, so you now owe the IP holder 1000 €.
It is complete horseshit
The vast majority of people pirating TOTK are just stealing it.
I wouldn’t have bought the stuff I pirated If I couldn’t have pirate it.
Surely people downloaded BOTW more times than TOTK over the 5+ years Yuzu has been around.
Copies of what
Tears of the kingdom.
How can I donate to the Yuzu devs to fight Nintendo on this?
Yuzu team is shit. Keep your money
You the pineappleEA guy? I love that I can have the patreon version for free with an easy updater thanks to the yuzu team stealing code from him and him having a vendetta.
Elaborate?
Found the tinfoil dev lmao
Brother… Nintendo’s net income last year was 3.1 BILLION dollars. There is no “fighting Nintendo”.
Let’s be real homie. Yuzu is done. Downvote me all you want after I post this.
As much as we all love Yuzu, the dev’s had to have known this was coming.
I don’t want to be one of those dudes that keeps harping on the “Nintendo should be FOR preserving old games”. We all know Nintendo will continue to kick down ANYONE so much as glancing in their I.P. 's general direction.
Nintendo does what you Nintendon’t want. Always.
Extreme capitalism stifles and suffocates innovation and preservation.
I’d like to seem them dump all those dollars in a legal battle they can’t win. Imagine if they succeed with the judge. They will lose their audience.
They didn’t expect it to happen because of all of the landmark rulings in the past that emulators are inherently not illegal unless they provide bios to the end user. The only reason why Nintendo is acting now instead of years ago when Yuzu first hit the scene is because it’s in basically a fully working state now and they somehow verified that 1,000,000 people downloaded TOTK. I suspect far more copies of BOTW and Mario Odyssey were downloaded prior.
The thing is whatever beef they might rightfully have with 1,000,000 people pirating TotK, it’s not the emulator who’s to blame. The ones who distributed pirated copies are. They are trying to pin it entirely on the wrong group, out of convenience/intimidation.
This is like suing a motorcycle company because a thief used one as a getaway vehicle.
I believe the issue is that Yuzu was patched to support TotK before TotK was released, which could suggest having used some proprietary code, or at least stuff that the devs shouldn’t have had access to.
They could also make the argument that very few people would’ve downloaded the game if the emulator didn’t exist or at least wasn’t being patched to support a game before it releases.
They definitely didn’t lose 1,000,000 sales. At the same time, I feel like it kind of crosses a line to be pirating a game before it’s even supposed to be sold in stores.
I’ve heard people saying just the opposite. It couldn’t run TotK before official release, and whoever made it run had to modify it independently (because it’s an open source project)
Arguing that people wouldn’t have downloaded it if not for the emulator, not only once again assigns blame to the wrong party (“if they didn’t have motorcycles to get away they might not have stolen it”), but it overlooks that there are modded Switches that can run pirated copies too.
Pirating stuff before it’s even out for sale is pretty sketchy, but Yuzu is not the one doing it. It simply lets people play copies they already have, including those they may have dumped themselves. Nintendo is encroaching on customer ownership rights by trying to argue even doing that is infringing.
edit: Maybe my analogy is lacking because one might argue that they rely on the tool to make use of the illicitly acquired thing, which is not necessarily true for a motorcycle. But if we say instead “the bluray player is to blame that people shoplifted” or “the media player is to blame that people downloaded pirated movies”, then I believe it should be even more clear that they are accusing the wrong party.
The only way for Nintendo’s reasoning to work is if they try to argue that not even someone who dumps their own roms and extracts their own keys from their own console ought to have the right to do it. Which would be disastrous for customer rights and preservation. Nintendo cannot be allowed to get away with that.
I haven’t yet. Sounds like I should add to that statistic.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it now: I bet most of those 1,000,000 people would have never bought a copy of the game anyway.
And some of them probably did buy the game, even
And many more who were friends of acquaintances of the downloader.
Pretty much, piracy are never lost sales. Either the person is extremely passionate and loving of the product so they’ll buy it anyway regardless if they pirated it or not; or they were just tasting the flavor of the week and never intended to buy it under any circumstance; or they are extremely poor/their economy and context doesn’t allow them to access the product legitimately, so they wouldn’t be capable of buying it even if they wanted; or the product is not legitimately available anymore, so pirating is the only way of accessing it.
Piracy is never a lost sale.
You were downvoted by a nintendo shill.
I bought the game and I still considered emulating it just to run it at higher res.
This is something that makes the Nintendo numbers bullshit. how many of those 1mill downloads were people who already owned/purchased the game? How many of those people don’t even have a switch and would have never purchased the game to begin with?
I’m thinking of it so I can play older patches of the game.
Out of interest, at a high level, why?
Did they patch out interesting exploits/speed run things?
There’s some easy duplication glitches.
I wonder if Nintendo released their games outside of their own ecosystem if that number would still be as high
Extremecapitalism stifles and suffocates innovation and preservation.It’s an inherent contradiction of capitalist competition. Somehow everyone is supposed to be competitive but noone is supposed to win for capitalism to “work”. Otherwise it’s considered a monopoly and “anti-competitive”.
Ironically this requires collaboration.
I had a feeling my adjective was too much.
The way you explain it makes me picture an ouroboros where, instead of the snake eating it’s ass, it’s the ass eating the snake.
I kind of doubt this because Yuzu doesn’t actually have any of the cryptographic key material that Nintendo could have a valid reason to sue over. They only offer instructions to dump keys, which has to be argued is causing harm because its completely legal to do on consoles and games that you own.
Dolphin ships with the Wii’s AES key but Nintendo never pursued them in court.
Most likely Nintendo won’t get anywhere and only get Yuzu to remove some wiki pages and stuff which will make it slightly harder to use or slow down development by threatening more lawsuits.
Nintendo know this. What everyone seems to be missing is that defending yourself in lawsuits also costs money.
Apple does this shit all the time.
Yet another reason I never buy anything from Nintendo. Fuck those fucks. On average only like 2 Nintendo games per console generation are ever any good anyway. They should be held responsible for all the e-waste they generate.
Emulators are not illegal. Fuck off Nintendo.
They might have a case if yuzu is actually decrypting switch software. That would be stupid of the developers, though. I would assume that they require you to provide decrypted games.
That’s basically the only leg nintendo has to stand on here, but nintendo can out lawyer you into the poor house regardless.
AFAIK rooted Switch consoles are used to decrypt the games and Yuzu just tries to execute whatever nonencrypted Switch binary. Unless Nintendo can prove that either the Yuzu developers themselves are behind ripping commercial Switch games or directly colluded with the rippers, they’d have a hard time to actually win. That said, regular people with normal income levels will probably just sign everything because a prolonged lawsuit is about just bankrupting them, not being ruled the win by the judge.
From their own guide
yuzu starts with the error “Missing Derivation Components”
yuzu requires console keys to play your games. Please follow our Quickstart Guide to dump these keys and system files from your Nintendo Switch.
Their guide also talks about dumping games from your console so I’m not sure how far it goes, but if they want console keys they are likely decrypting something
Yuzu doesn’t do any encryption breaking. The user is meant to use their Switch to dump their keys, which are legally owned by the user. Then it uses those legal keys to decrypt the ROMs by the exact normal method that the Switch itself uses. They were going based on precedent legal rulings about console emulation. Copying the decryption keys and making copies of the software for archival purposes have both been previously ruled to be perfectly legal for the enduser and don’t constitute piracy. This suit will challenge that notion.
Then it uses those legal keys to decrypt the ROMs by the exact normal method that the Switch itself uses
this is the part where they circumvent the copyright protection, even if you do it “the same way” it’s still not authorized, the DMCA is fairly broad about this stuff, one of the reasons it’s so bad
I’ve been holding off on jailbreaking my launch Switch until the next one is out, but I think the time has come.
EDIT: Aaand done. Biggest surprise so far is that there’s a homebrew Pizza Tower port for it! This game really belongs on consoles.
RCM loader/jig is like $8
I’ve had one for years, waiting for when Nintendo dropped support. I’m not gonna give them any more money as far as the Switch is concerned, so no reason not to go for it now. A project for this weekend, maybe.
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I sincerely hope that Yuzu developers don’t end up like Gary Bowser and have their income garnished for life by Nintendo.
As much as I dislike Nintendo and wish Yuzu devs all the best I’d like to point out that Bowser wasn’t some innocent guy who was caught by big bad company - Moonie has a video that goes into specifics about his involvement with a pirate enterprise worth a shitton of money.
Other than that yeah, I hope they can survive this situation. I wonder if Ryujinx devs are next.
Isn’t moonie the dude who shit talked Karl Jobst and ended up deleting his video because Jobst called him out on how wrong he was on pretty much everything and how terrible his research was. Like literally just watched a couple YouTube videos level research? Don’t know if I can trust someone who would fuck up THAT bad. I get people make mistakes sometimes but that’s just complete negligence especially for someone with an audience that big.
No idea, I’m only familiar with some of his videos so can’t say one way or another. Is there any place I could read about it?
Edit: Also, I believe the video I mentioned has links to specific legal documents surrounding this case so it should be easy to fact check. Still, I’m not trying to whitewash the situation you wrote about would love to learn more if it happened.
Edit 2: A’ight, while I didn’t have time for a deep dive I did manage to confirm that situation happened.
I sucks since the videos I’ve seen seemed reasonably researched and now I’m wondering whether that was a one-time screw up or a normal thing that simply wasn’t caught more often. Guess I’ll try to look into it more when I’m free.
The video by Karl Jobst himself on the matter is pretty informative and has proof to back up all of his claims. Iirc moonie also quoted legal statue and stuff on his video but was rebuked my Karl as well, don’t quote me on this though, I’ll have to rewatch that video to confirm. Here’s the link. Moonie did end up apologizing in the end and Karl did tell his viewers right off the back to not harass Moonie.
If you like LONG form reasonably researched videos about all sorts of topics check out Hbomberguy. He’s great.
Iirc moonie also quoted legal statue and stuff on his video but was rebuked my Karl as well
Yeah, that’s why I’m planning to look into whether that was a screw up or not, thanks for the link too.
I’m familiar with HBG but it’s always good to mention him.
He’s not innocent and went to jail for it, but does it warrant garnishing his income for life? I think they went too far with that.
Oh no, I completely agree no one should be completely screwed over piracy. Just wanted to add some context as I saw a lot of discussion about him ending with “poor innocent dude” without digging into details. That’s all.
Nintendo has a lot of problems that should absolutely be called out. I hope me trying to add more details didn’t imply otherwise.
They are taking his income for life, that’s an insane overreach specially for a big successful company like Nintendo, and it didn’t matter since the actual team behind it is back selling flashcarts that are even better than having to solder a chip.
Yes, it is insane. That case is also a great showcase of how trying to make example out of a single guy doesn’t really work since, as you mentioned, rest of the team is still doing their thing.
I’d like to think (well, hope anyway) that no one looks at Bowser’s story and thinks “yeah, that’s a reasonable conclusion”.
