Switch emulator creators settle lawsuit with Nintendo for $2.4 million

It's Tuesday, March 05, 2024.

The creator of a popular Nintendo Switch emulator, Yuzu, appears to have agreed to settle Nintendo’s lawsuit against it, less than a week since the games company accused the emulator’s creator of “piracy at a colossal scale.”

A joint final judgment and permanent injunction filed Tuesday says developer Tropic Haze will pay the games company $2.4 million — along with a long list of concessions. The people behind Tropic Haze must halt all “activities related to offering, marketing, distributing or trafficking in Yuzu emulator or any similar software that circumvents Nintendo’s technical protection measures.” No more emulating, then. It must even surrender the emulator’s web domain (including any variants) to Nintendo. The website is still live at time of writing.

In recent years, Nintendo has increased its efforts to quash popular emulators and game piracy sites. It sued ROM-sharing website RomUniverse for $2 million and helped send hacker Gary Bowser to prison. Will this latest lawsuit stop people trying to emulate Nintendo consoles and games? No. But it’ll likely deter anyone trying to make a buck out of it.

We also take a look back at how Steam reshaped video games in the past two decades.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

National Guardsman who leaked US defense secrets on Discord agrees to 16-year plea deal

Steam defined the modern video game industry

Shure’s first wireless lapel mic can connect to your phone without a receiver

You can get these reports delivered daily direct to your inbox. Subscribe right here!

Apple announces new MacBook Airs with M3 chips

This is the same CPU that powers the latest MacBook Pro laptops.

As predicted yesterday, Apple revealed new MacBooks. This time, it’s MacBook Air laptops housing the company’s latest Apple Silicone: M3 chips. No Pro or Max options, but it’s also ‘just’ a MacBook Air — the company’s entry-level laptop. Expect performance increases of 17 percent in single-core tasks and 21 percent in multi-core tasks, according to Apple’s estimates. As before, both computers max out at 24GB of RAM and 2TB of storage. There is now support for up to two external displays when the laptop is closed, as well as Wi-Fi 6E.

The 13-inch M3 MacBook Air is $1,099, while the 15-inch model starts at $1,299. The M2 13-inch model will remain at $999 — now mighty tempting at that price. Both of the new MacBook Air models are available to pre-order today.

Continue reading.

Twitter’s former CEO and other execs are suing X for $128 million in unpaid severance

The group says Musk “made up a fake cause” for their firing.

A group of former Twitter executives, including former CEO Parag Agrawal, is suing Elon Musk and X over millions of dollars in unpaid severance benefits. The claims date back to the chaos surrounding Musk’s takeover of the company in October 2022. The lawsuit cites Musk biographer Walter Isaacson’s account of the events, which explains Musk rushed to close the Twitter deal a day early to fire the executives “for cause” just before their final stock options were set to vest.

Continue reading.

Instagram finally lets you edit DMs

If you’re quick.

Meta just rolled out a software update for Instagram that finally allows DM edits. However, you have to do it within 15 minutes of sending the message. It seems the messages won’t be tagged as ‘edited,’ like Apple’s Messages or WhatsApp, either.

Continue reading.