Popular open source Nintendo Switch emulator Ryujinx has been removed from GitHub and the team behind it has reportedly halted development on the project after apparent talks with Nintendo.
Ryujinx developer rijpiperi writes on the project's Discord server and social media that fellow developer gdkchan “has been contacted by Nintendo and offered an agreement to stop working on the project, and the organization and all related assets over which he has control has control to remove.” While the final outcome of those negotiations is not yet public, Rijpiperi reports that “the organization has been removed” (presumably from GitHub) and so “I think it's safe to say what the outcome is.”
Although the Ryujinx website is still active at the time of writing, the download page and other links to GitHub-hosted information from that website no longer work. The developers behind the project have not posted a regular progress report update since January, after posting similar updates almost every month in 2023. Before today, social media account Ryujinx last posted an announcement in March.
Followers of the Switch emulation scene may recall that March was also the month in which the makers of the Yuzu emulator paid $2.4 million to settle a lawsuit with Nintendo over a project that Nintendo claimed was “piracy of colossal made scale possible.”
What's left?
Switch emulator Suyu, which emerged as a “legal gray area” Yuzu fork shortly after the Suyu removal, is still available on its own self-hosted servers at the time of writing (though the latest stable release of it project is now six months old). Nintendo previously targeted Suyu's GitLab hosting via a DMCA takedown and later disabled the project's official Discord server with a similar request. Another prominent Yuzu fork, Sudachi, was removed from GitHub via DMCA request in July.
In the wake of these legal efforts against other developers of the Switch emulator, the Ryujinx developers posted an automated message on their Discord server in response to any questions regarding Ryujinx's ultimate fate. “Nothing happens to Ryujinx,” the message read. 'We know nothing more than you. No doomsday scenario.'
A video of an in-development Ryujinx feature that enables local wired multiplayer between an emulator and official hardware.
Riperiperi reports that development will now stop on “a working Android port” of the emulator, which was not yet ready for release, as well as on a technical demo iOS version that would likely have remained a “novelty” due to Apple's just- in- time compilation restrictions. Developers were also working on updates that would have enabled local wired multiplayer gameplay connections between Ryujinx and real Switch hardware.
“While I won't be staying in the Switch scene either, I still believe in emulation as a whole, and I hope this doesn't deter other developers,” Rijpiperi wrote on the project's Discord. “The future of game conservation depends on individuals, and perhaps one day this will be properly recognized.”
According to the developers, “As of May 2024, Ryujinx [had] tested on approximately 4,300 titles; more than 4,100 boots[ed] beyond menus and into gameplay, of which approximately 3,550 are considered playable.”
