Following the demise of Yuzu earlier this year, Switch emulator Ryujinx apparently stopped development and went offline after Nintendo contacted its creator.
Ryujinx initially appeared in 2018, began development the year before, and was the first Switch emulator capable of running commercial games. The open source project has continued since then, with creator gdkchan funding development through Patreon.
Now, however, it seems that Ryujinx has gone the way of the now-defunct Switch emulator Yuzu. Users began reporting a 404 message when trying to access Ryujinx's Github page today, and concern grew when the emulator's download page became inaccessible.
News of Ryujinx's fate finally emerged via a message on the emulator's Discord server (thanks Agency). “Yesterday, Nintendo contacted gdkchan and offered him an agreement to stop working on the project, eliminate the organization and all related assets it has under control,” co-developer riperiperi explained in the post.
Ryujinx's demise comes just seven months after Tropical Haze, the developer of the open-source Yuzu emulator, agreed to pay Nintendo $2.4 million in damages and cease all operations after the Mario maker filed a lawsuit. lawsuit alleging that the emulator facilitated piracy “on a colossal scale.” . On that note, it's perhaps no surprise that Ryujinx's creator chose to pull the plug on the emulator rather than face the wrath of the infamously litigious Nintendo.
In 2022, for example, hacker Gary Bowser was sentenced to 40 months in prison (and ordered to pay $4.5 million) for the distribution and sale of devices that enabled hacking. In 2021, ROM site owner RomUniverse was hit with a $2.1 million bill for copyright and trademark infringement, and an Arizona couple was ordered to pay Nintendo $12.2 million in 2018 for managing two sites that offered pirated ROMs. Plus, he doesn't really like Palworld right now either.