Nintendo’s fired off a new volley of legal notices against the Switch emulation scene. Close to a dozen GitHub pages were hit with DMCA takedown requests over the weekend. However, while several of the Nintendo Switch GitHub pages have given in to Nintendo’s demands, the development team behind the Eden emulator has boldly refused. Instead, they proceed with publishing a new v0.2.0 build of the Eden Switch emulator on GitHub just days later.
You may remember that, back in 2024, Yuzu and Ryujinx, the two most well-known Switch emulators, were subject to legal takedown notices from Nintendo following a massive million dollar settlement. Nintendo’s crackdown on the Switch emulation scene scattered homebrew efforts to various, less easily accessed corners of the internet. But the cat and mouse game has continued over the years, and Nintendo is once again trying to prune back grassroots efforts to reverse-engineer its most popular console ever.
You could argue that, technically, the majority of these emulators aren’t exactly new, as almost all of them are forks (an offshoot of the existing codebase) of either Yuzu or Ryujinx. In the case of Eden, this is true, as the Nintendo Switch emulator is a fork of Yuzu. In spite of this, Eden’s development team seems relatively un-phased by Nintendo’s latest wave of DMCA notices. The project’s founder isn’t being shy about the team plan to fight back against the company’s latest legal offensive.
In a statement to Wccftech, Eden founder Camille LaVey revealed that they believe the emulator’s GitHub page isn’t breaking any of the website’s hosting policies: “Effectively, as founder of Eden, I can say that we want to keep continuing the work in the preservation of videogames, allowing game owners to benefit from this beyond their original hardware. Since this is a community-driven project, we always look to provide the best result possible for all; yet, we’re never sure of what the future can bring, so we’re always trying to ask the community to help us in any way they can, so Eden can still be alive for the years to come.”
As of writing, Eden’s GitHub page is still up, even though GitHub clearly states that pages issued with DMCA notices have roughly “1 business day to make requested changes” before being removed. Tied with LaVey’s statement to Wccftech, this likely means that the Eden team has issued a counter notice against Nintendo.
Even if Eden’s stand is short-lived, emulation enthusiasts are adamant that Nintendo’s crusade will never be able to completely eradicate Switch emulation from the internet. “If they kill one, 10 more will pop up,” wrote one commenter on the Android emulation subreddit. “Kill 10, 100 more will pop up. They can never kill emulation.”