Discord Is Taking Out Nintendo Switch Emulator Developers And Servers

Marvel villain Thanos snaps a Nintendo Switch with the Yuzu log on the screen out of existence.

The battle against Nintendo Switch emulation isn’t over yet. The Mario maker got the prominent emulation software Yuzu to cave in, shut down, and pay out on March 4, and now the popular chat platform Discord is reportedly nuking the accounts and servers belonging to other Nintendo Switch emulator devs.

According to The Verge, Discord has shut down everything connected to Suyu and Sudachi, two Nintendo Switch emulators that spawned after Nintendo broke up the Yuzu gang in early March. This includes both of the emulators’ servers on the platform, as well as the accounts tied to developers working on the software. The folks behind the tech said, per The Verge, that they received only “vague messages” from Discord about how they were passing around content that reportedly violated IP rights. The company’s Director of Product Communications, Kellyn Slone, told The Verge it’s just following normal processes for DMCA takedown requests.

“Discord responds to and complies with all legal and valid Digital Millennium Copyright Act requests,” Slone said in a statement to The Verge. “In this instance, there was also a court ordered injunction for the takedown of these materials, and we took action in a manner consistent with the court order.”

A Sudachi developer named Jarrod Norwell posted an image to X/Twitter on April 10 of a Discord email. The email said that Norwell’s account was disabled because the company found it to be “in violation of [Discord’s] Terms of Service or Community Guidelines” for allegedly “[sharing] content that violates anyone’s intellectual property or other rights.” Norwell told The Verge that no other information was provided and claimed that Sudachi wasn’t doing anything wrong. In fact, the emulator developers The Verge spoke to said that they were all working hard to change the code to ensure that the Eye of Nintendo wasn’t on them. It’s also questionable whether the existence of the Discord servers violated anything in the court order, and how their deletion matches Discord’s own policy.

Kotaku has reached out to Discord, Nintendo, and various related emulator developers for comment.

With this, it appears Nintendo isn’t slowing down in its relentless aim at emulation. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was illegally downloaded over one million times a full week-and-a-half before its May 12, 2023 launch, in a form only playable via such emulation (before going on to sell over 20 million copies in the year since). Yeah, Nintendo really hates this stuff.

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