A sad day for emulation and open source advocates, and a reminder that Nintendo can and will destroy you if they see fit.
Hopefully their works will live in the saved repos just as ReVanced was able to live on after YouTube shut the original project down.
Their decision to profit off the project was their downfall.
I do wonder if this is specifically what got them, would probably take a lemmy lawyer to unpack it, but I would have to imagine if they didn’t have a patreon and basically a company, it would have been much harder for Nintendo to do anything about them. And I would also imagine in retrospect whatever money they got was not worth it when it ends like this.
I always assume when people operate services like this, that they host it in a country like Russia that’s less likely to care about takedowns by western corpos and done anonymously as possible. Even though it’s just an emulator, you would think they wouldn’t be so brazen as to have a patreon which I’m sure requires someone’s identity/billing info. They probably still could have been tracked down if they took crypto donations or something like that, but you would think that would be the first choice over putting a giant target on their backs. Patreon is obviously just gonna hand over whatever info they are asked to give when served a warrent, and so is Discord for that matter if they had any personal info on there too.
Afaik what got them was providing fixes for an unreleased game behind a paywall. Hard to deny the piracy aspect when you are actively profiting off of it.
From the little I’ve read I think it’s the patreon money, the support to make things work like keys etc, showing a list of working games, and generally being blatant about using it for playing pirated games in their official communication
It seems to be a deciding factor for Nintendo to sue
It may have also been the fact that they linked to instruction on how to rip prod.keys and system firmwares. Also their instructions on enabling running copyrighted ROMs - despite the fact that Ripping game ROMs and firmware is not (unfortunately arguably, due to licencing models and jurisdiction - you will own nothing and like it.) illegal so long as it’s for personal use.
They should’ve advertised it primarily as a testing and homebrew platform, and made sure not to make too much mention of the fact it can be used to play backups. Then they can at least play the ignorance card with more confidence.
Even then though, multi-billion yen company Nintendo probably would still pull this shit and drag, drag, drag the lawsuit out for forever and a day- draining lawyers fees of money. That being the case, settling is unfortunately the only option.