Game news A loss of more than a million! Zelda Tears of the Kingdom results tainted by emulation, Nintendo goes on the offensive
The wave of emulation experienced by the latest Zelda worries Nintendo executives. Will a legal attack be able to resolve all these problems?
Number 1 in sales for 2023 in France, The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom is one of the most notable games of recent years. By surpassing the figures of its predecessor in the same period, it became the 9th best success of the Switch with more than 20 million copies sold. However, certain practices came to hinder its efforts, which did not please Nintendo executives too much. Indeed, deemed illegal according to certain criteria, video game emulation has allowed many users to play Zelda without having purchased it. Faced with this practice, Nintendo was forced to launch a legal attack.
Emulation, an economical solution?
If you are a fan of video games, you have surely heard of emulators. They allow you to play any game on a platform as long as you have a computer powerful enough to run them. There are a lot of emulators on the market, but we can for example cite Citra which is the number one for 3DS games. And contrary to what many people think, emulation is not completely illegal. If you own a copy of the game, you have the right to play it on an emulator, otherwise, it is at your own risk. Being an unconventional practice, even illegal in certain cases, one could imagine that emulation only attracts a limited audience. So why did Nintendo panic and attempt a lawsuit? Well because there have been more than 1 million downloads of The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom in 2023.
Nintendo and emulation, a beautiful love story
Yes you understood correctly, more than 1 million copies of Tears of the Kingdom were uploaded to a single emulation service. It is Yuzu who is singled out here, considered the number 1 emulator for Nintendo Switch. This million downloads were reached illegally because they were executed before the official release of the game. Nintendo therefore took legal action against the company Tropic Haze, creator of Yuzu. This lawsuit seems to work in favor of the Japanese company because, on the one hand, many of their games were distributed illegally before their public release on the emulator, and on the other hand, Nintendo has previously already won a lawsuit against a similar site. It was in 2021 that the RomUniverse site had to pay more than $2 million in compensation to the video game giant for a story of the same ilk. Suffice to say that Yuzu doesn’t only have good days ahead of him.