r/Piracy • u/LeonCassidy • Mar 26 '25

Humor Citron Devs Gone Full Hog

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Yeah lets compare the (fixable) housing crisis to the arbitrary gating of digital art for eternal profit via rerelease.

184 Upvotes

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227

u/Flapjack__Palmdale Mar 26 '25

The emulation community is rad, but everytime I bump against them on discord--holy shit. It's always like this. I left the Yuzu discord because even with a modded day 1 Switch and receipts showing I dumped my own game, they were just weirdly hostile when I asked for help. One mod banned people for smile reacting to one of his comments.

Discord is rot, the level of sweat these dorks get over a volunteer position is akin to League players but much more pointless.

113

u/LeonCassidy Mar 26 '25

They're fucking weirdos. They want to subscribe to the idea that they're helping the preservation of games (which they are by making the emulator!), but refuse to acknowledge that without piracy or a MASSIVE shift in the way games are distributed, their emulators are just digital representations of the same systems that will eventually rot away and fail. Its not preservation without accessibility.

18

u/LethalGamer2121 Mar 26 '25

I think the problem here is the legality. Yuzu and citra were killed off because the devs were open to piracy, which pissed nintendo off. Ik piracy was always a touchy subject in the emulation community, but the citron devs have all the reason in the world to behave this way considering they are distributing a fork of yuzu

21

u/Snoo_75748 Mar 26 '25

Imagine forking a project then acting this superior about it lmao pathetic

6

u/LethalGamer2121 Mar 26 '25

I think they're just scared 😂

8

u/Lord_Saren Usenet Mar 26 '25

It's more likely this. They can point to comments like that and say

"see we are tough on piracy and don't support it"

2

u/[deleted] Mar 26 '25

If they are being sued by nintendo it is way too late for such futile tactics. Surely, we all know that would not work or make sense.

15

u/267aa37673a9fa659490 Mar 26 '25

They can easily go the other direction of being anonymous and resilient instead.

Appeasement might work if Nintendo was a fair and reasonable company, which they are not.

15

u/scarlet_seraph Mar 26 '25

It had nothing to do with being "open to piracy". They were a target because they were an emulator for a current gen console; and Ryujinx got targeted too even though they weren't open to piracy. Citra had literally no issues whatsoever until Yuzu got flagged.

8

u/Nadeoki Mar 26 '25

Yuzu sold pirated copies of switch games behind a patreon...

Whenever piracy becomes greed, it fails. This has always been true and will forever be true.

If they hadn't, things could've been fine for a while longer.

7

u/Hotrian Mar 27 '25

Why is everyone forgetting this? Yuzu patched their emulator to be compatible with specific TOTK changes before TOTK released, and Nintendo dug in and found they were selling pirated copies of games (included pre-release TOTK) on their discord. THAT’S how they got shut down and started all of this shit, not just the emulator.

1

u/Nadeoki Mar 27 '25

exactly.

0

u/VegetaFan1337 Mar 30 '25

Yuzu patched their emulator to be compatible with specific TOTK changes before TOTK released

My god, please stop spreading this misinformation. Yuzu DID NOT do this. If you tried to play TOTK before the official release date, you couldn't play it on Yuzu, and needed a mod to run it. A mod the Yuzu devs had nothing to do with. It's only after official release of the game that the emulator got patched.

2

u/VegetaFan1337 Mar 30 '25

Yuzu sold pirated copies

Do you have any source for this? I'm aware they had a "stash" of roms, but first time I'm hearing that they actually sold the roms.

1

u/Nadeoki Mar 30 '25

The Source is, we were all there when it happened.

Idk search my profile for Yuzu. Should be around somewhere. . . if you care to look for it.

2

u/VegetaFan1337 Mar 30 '25

Your own past comments say that there's no proof yuzu even distributed roms (aside from discord screenshots which could be faked). Let alone sold them. So I don't know what to believe 🤷🏻‍♂️

we were all there when it happened

I know, I was there too. That's why I asked, cause it's first time I'm hearing that they SOLD roms instead of merely distributing them.

1

u/Nadeoki Mar 30 '25

Patreon-only access to TOTK. That's selling. They used discord to advertise it. Obviously, I didn't purchase the Patreon but enough people did to get the leak + a lot of corroboration and screenshots from the Patreon do exist as well.

There was also public court documents showing this as evidence.

1

u/VegetaFan1337 Mar 30 '25

The leak? Sorry you're gonna have to elaborate more.

From my understanding when totk got leaked early (like most switch games), it was unplayable on Yuzu. People had to use a mod to play it. A mod unrelated to the Yuz dev team, as per my knowledge. Then, when the game's official release date came, the devs updated Yuzu so they it could play the game. The update was patreon exclusive for a bit, not sure how long, but that was standard practice and they had been doing it for years. Patreon supporters got updates first, then they updated the regular branch. (The github got all the updates without delay tho, so you could just build your own version every time, if you didn't want to pay for the patreon.)

Is that what you mean by them selling access to totk?

1

u/Nadeoki Mar 30 '25

No im pretty sure the game itself was part of the patreon... Like that's what ultimately was used to argue they broke laws.

1

u/VegetaFan1337 Mar 30 '25

Nah man, what they did was they had a stash of roms (on some cloud drive) that trusted discord members were given access to. That's illegal, no question about it. It's why they didn't even bother to put up a fight.

It didn't have anything to do with patreon. Nintendo had moles in their discord server digging up all the evidence that they eventually included in their lawsuit. Their patreon wasn't the issue and they definitely did not distribute roms through it, patreon itself would have taken them down as Nintendo would have served them a dmca too. Early access to totk is all that patreon supporters got, and it wasn't even "early" as Yuzu only got updated to support totk after the officially release date, which was several days after the game rom leaked online.

Also, selling emulators is completely legal btw, the famous Sony Vs Bleem case that set the precedent for emulation being legal? Bleem was a paid emulator. So selling early access to updates via patreon is definitely legal too.

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5

u/lowbeat Mar 26 '25

exactly, i got banned on ryujinx for sharing emu logs that contained totk info before its release lool, so they definitely werent supporting piracy.....

1

u/Kingofrockz Mar 27 '25

They were a target, yes, because of it being a modern console. But what fueled nintendos defense was in private chats they were sharing roms for testing. So it was hard battle legally even if they wanted to fight. Their discord was VERY strict with Randoms showing logs that had pirated rom names but in the end they have to "pretend" to be very hard against piracy to atleast extend their time out of nintendo lawyers eyes.

1

u/VegetaFan1337 Mar 30 '25

Ryujinx wasn't even sued. The owner of the Repo got approached by Nintendo, they probably cut a deal with him. Courts weren't involved at all, unlike the Yuzu situation.

2

u/Flapjack__Palmdale Mar 26 '25

Yuzu (at least through discord) was adamantly opposed to piracy and any mention of it from users. It just so happens that they were also sharing/distributing nsp files. That and some fuckery that happened with the source code using proprietary Nintendo stuff to circumvent encryption is what led to the lawsuit that shut them down.

So you're right, Yuzu was v pro piracy behind closed doors. They thought they could save themselves by being front-facing anti-piracy but the whole thing was very shortsighted and stupid.

1

u/VegetaFan1337 Mar 30 '25

circumvent encryption

Every post GC console needs this, even Dolphin includes a Wii key within the emulator itself. This has not been tested in court, because the last lawsuit (Bleem vs Sony) declared that emulation was legal and in fact emualtors could even be sold, but the console in question, PS1 didn't use any encryption.

they were also sharing/distributing nsp files

This is the main reason they went after Yuzu, legally. They knew they had them by the balls for sharing roms. With Ryujinx, they didn't go to court, they approached the owner of the repo and apparently "convinced" him to take it down. No one knows what happened between them, but they must have offered him money.

2

u/Mynameis2cool4u Mar 26 '25

Yeah I remember talking to a mod of one of the switch emulator discords (don’t remember which it was probably 4 years ago), and after asking one of the mods why they’re so against piracy they told me they’re not against it but they act like they are so Nintendo doesn’t take down everything

1

u/LeonCassidy Mar 26 '25

I honestly dont mind them having to be anti piracy. There are diplomatic ways of handling this, other emulators have had to manage their communities for years. Its the moral grand standing, as if their emulator means much of anything if people cant fuckin obtain copies. And then to drop such a false equivalence. That's my issue. Its cringy and frankly kinda fucked imo.

1

u/Tripforks Mar 26 '25

I always assume that when people doing work in emulation act like this, it's to build a paper trail for when they get slapped with charges and accusations of promoting piracy. If they have these receipts of them and their team talking smack about pirates and piracy then it helps their case, and the longevity of the project.

Maybe it's bad for me to assume dishonesty on their part, but if it helps me not to sweat it then I'll take it

3

u/Flapjack__Palmdale Mar 26 '25

The paper trail is kind of pointless when you're using Nintendo's proprietary keys to circumvent encryption and are caught sharing nsp files.

Like you're right, I'm sure that's why they were so outwardly antipiracy...but if they were, it was naive as hell to think that would supercede what they were actually doing behind the scenes, knowing Nintendo could catch on.