It sure as fuck was. Half of the Nintendo community knows about this situation, and unless for some reason they still have respect for this evil company, they will now freely play whatever switch games they want without giving Nintendo a dime.
I'm sure most Nintendo "fans" aren't a fan of the company itself, just the games
It genuinely surprises me the amount of diehard nintendo fans who will defend the corporation's heinous acts tooth and nail that there are. They make good games, and they were my childhood, therefore their wrongs are excusable (or not wrongs at all)!
Yes it was, but in some ways Nintendo still succeeded In what I believe is their goal - to scatter the developers.
By shutting down Yuzu, they fragmented everyone into forking their own copies and competing to become the next Yuzu.
What's more of a threat to them? One emulator with thousands of contributors, or 1000 emulators with 2-5 contributors each?
The best thing about open source is the pooling of developers and resources. While forking is neither a good nor a bad thing, it does tend to break up the developer pool.
It could take anywhere from months to years if at all for everyone to finally settle on a single fork and get back to the level of developer pool that originally existed - then if that happens, Nintendo can come along and do it all over again, at least untill they don't see the value in continuing.
Honestly, anyone that was gonna emulate switch already knew, and nintendo has all their big hitters out of the way so isn't going to be loosing much in terms of sales to piracy at this point. they just want a chilling effect for switch 2
If I had to guess the reason they're going after yuzu so hard is that the Switch 2 is going to be architecturally identical and that you will be able to run Switch 2 games.
Nintendo knows this, but it was an easy $2.3 million and now Yuzu development is essentially halted for the time being, meaning slower progress with switch updates, releases, and new hardware (eg switch 2).
Any victory for the FOSS/emulation community is a pyrrhic one.
I was already emulating, but I prefer to play on a TV so I still bought games for my launch Switch. I was waiting for their next console before I jailbroke it, but annoyance with Nintendo for doing this pushed me to do it this past weekend. Now they'll get no more sales from me on the Switch guaranteed.
And the subsequent C&Ds/lawsuits to the idiots who are "forking" the tainted codebase will do an even better job of explaining "you fuck with Nintendo and we will literally own you for the rest of your life"
That also assumes the various projects have competent developers (unlikely since anyone with the technical ability knows why you don't touch this code) and isn't just a way to rush in some crypto miners and spyware to people who are mad they can't have yuzu.
Nuzu is just a fork with a rename. There is not going to be real work on the emulator anyways. And it's even hosted on GitHub... The worst Git server out there.
Future Devs should take note here and develop anonymously and use git over i2p. Develop in private and push code and binaries to public facing mirrors under aliases using tor.
If you want donations accept monero or something.
Also make multiple forks during development and just have them scattered all over the place in the event one goes down. So each contributor has their own fork with its own branding or something.
Dont publish any instructions showing dumping keys or roms in any capacity representing the project. Do it as Joe Random a regular internet user and let it spread organically.
The only thing they did wrong was having the key dumping info associated with them. Nothing else needed to have been done different. Without that, they would have been completely legal. Dumping roms is totally fine.
You want people to know it was you that did all this technically impressive work and problem solving. Had they not done that one thing, they would have been fine putting their names on their work.
You should really probably keep this on the DL. No reason to shut the project down regardless of what Nintendo does, but this needs to be done quietly now since it's gotten a ton of attention.
Edit: Just bcz, fuck you nintendo, I'm never buying your consoles again. You lost any remaining sliver of goodwill you had with this move.