More than a million people have played Tears of the Kingdom illegally

The case filed for one of Nintendo's emulator tools shows that more than one million users illegally downloaded Tears of the Kingdom before its release.

A new lawsuit has just been filed against Tropic Haze, the maker of the Yuzu Nintendo Switch emulator. One of the most important charges raised in this case is the illegal download of more than one million copies of the game Tears of the Kingdom using the Yuzu service before the legal release of the game in May 2023. As we know, Nintendo takes these issues very seriously and is considering a strong legal prosecution.

For example, it was in 2021 that the company won a similar legal case against a ROM platform and eventually received $2.1 million in damages from them. Matteo Sturman , the owner of the RomUniverse site , whose activities were dedicated to the publication of ROMs of classic Nintendo games, was sentenced by a California state court to permanently destroy all unauthorized Nintendo games and other content belonging to this brand, including movies, books and music.

In addition, when the Nintendo Switch was released, some hacker groups were able to exploit the security gaps in the console's hardware and install unauthorized codes on it by reverse engineering. After months of legal battles, Nintendo finally managed to get Gary W. Bowser , one of the leaders of the Team-Xecuter hacking group, sentenced to 40 months in prison.

In the text of this complaint, which was recently made available to the public, we read: "Yuzu virtually provides the possibility of illegal decryption and the experience of Nintendo Switch games to any user from around the world, which includes current generation games and some of the most popular games of this platform. These actions were taken without paying any money for the Nintendo console or for the purchase of these games."

Among these accusations, there is a claim of making it possible to download one million copies of the Tears of the Kingdom game, through which Nintendo seeks to receive at least $150,000 in compensation from the developers of Yuzu Tools. This report, which was first published by Stephen Tutillo on Twitter, indicates that Nintendo is finally looking to completely stop the activities of this emulator and effectively eliminate any risk of illegal downloading of games using the service's system in the future.