Nintendo Took Down Ryujinx

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Published: Oct 1, 2024, 7:43PM

People noticed a few hours ago that Ryujinx's GitHub repository was down. Many did not think much of it, as there was no DMCA notice, and assumed it was a temporary shutdown. However, it didn’t take long to receive an explanation, as this announcement was just posted on Ryujinx's Discord.

"Yesterday, gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and offered an agreement to stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets he's in control of. While awaiting confirmation on whether he would take this agreement, the organization has been removed, so I think it's safe to say what the outcome is. Rather than leave you with only panic and speculation, I decided to write this short message to give some closure. These words are my own. I don't want to speak for anyone else here, so just remember that while reading. Thank you to everyone who has contributed code, documentation or issue reports to the project. Thank you all for following us throughout the development. I was able to learn a lot of really neat things about games that I love, enjoy them with renewed qualities and in unique circumstances, and I'm sure you all have experiences that are similarly special. I'm extending my own massive thanks to our moderation team, who have been here through some rough circumstances and always found ways to make light of it."

After the statement, Ryujinx showed off some unreleased projects related to Ryujinx including an iOS and Android Port:

"We had a working iOS port that ran really well, thanks to some amazing work on a special memory mode with a partitioned address space that both emulated 4kb pages and squeezed the process address space to fit within ridiculous restrictions. Without a UI, or easy way to run JIT untethered, it remained a novelty, so was not released. The hardware is great, it's unfortunate that it's wrapped up in pointless restrictions."

"We also had a working Android port, which did have a UI, but due to driver quirks (performance, accuracy) and OS issues, was not in a releasable state. Rather than suffer support headaches and.. uh... the android emulation community, we held back until a later date. emmaus worked like crazy on the UI and getting everything to work with nativeaot, even allowing Ryujinx to be embedded as a native library."

Many speculated that Nintendo offered the creator of Ryujinx money but it would later be confirmed that Ryujinx was hit with a cease and desist from Nintendo after someone on Reddit asked one of the developers.

Now, all downloads for Ryujinx have been taken down, and the Discord server has stopped accepting any additional invites. This is terrible news for emulation enthusiasts, as Ryujinx was the last pillar of Nintendo Switch emulation after Yuzu's shutdown following Nintendo's lawsuit against the emulator. The future of Nintendo Switch emulation now looks very grim.