Nintendo has just issued DMCA takedowns against seven GitHub repositories hosting Switch emulation code, leading to 401 affected repos being removed from the platform. Most of these belonged to a single parent repo of the Suyu emulator, which itself is a fork of the previously shut down Yuzu emulator. Nintendo leveraged GitHub policies to their fullest extent to execute its notice, arguing that emulators inherently rely on circumventing anti-piracy protections built into Switch games.
TorrentFreak reports that this was a coordinated campaign by Nintendo as it filed seven different strikes on the same day. GitHub has a rule that says if a parent repo contains more than 100 forks, then the platform will not look at each one individually but rather remove the entire network. Suyu had 311 of these repos under its parent, so all of them were wiped off the map. Suyu was born in 2024, picking up after Yuzu following a lawsuit against its creators, Tropic Haze, that ended in a settlement.
