Nintendo Switch emulation

The coverage and development of the emulators has attracted notable attention from the industry, including Nintendo, as well as Denuvo Software Solutions GmbH which, at the request of publishing companies partnered with them concerned about piracy, has developed a digital rights management measure intended to prevent play of emulated Switch games.

In March 2017, it was reported that claims of a functioning Nintendo Switch emulator had spread online via YouTube videos and fraudulent postings on GitHub.

This attracted attention from the Federal Trade Commission, which advised the public that no such software existed and that the only way to play Nintendo Switch games was on the real actual system.

[11] Skyline was an experimental Switch emulator for Android devices, which was initially capable of playing Sonic Mania, Celeste, and parts of Super Mario Odyssey.

[16] In October 2019, Gizmodo published an article noting that Yuzu was able to emulate some games at a frame rate roughly on par with the actual console hardware.

[17] In September 2020, Nintendo Life published an article saying that a The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild mod worked on Ryujinx and other emulators.

[24][25][26][27][28][29] On October 9, 2021, Kotaku published an article stating that Metroid Dread was running "great" on Yuzu and Ryujinx, adding that "you can play Dread on your computer, right now", and including several positive mentions of video game piracy, thanking "pirates, emulators, modders, and hackers" and suggesting readers emulate older or expensive games themselves.

[23] After receiving criticism, Kotaku revised the article to clarify they were referring to emulation in video game preservation[30] and, following a complaint from Nintendo, removed all mentions of piracy from the article and issued an apology for its initial failure to meet their editorial standards, adding that they had not intended to suggest that players should pirate video games.

GamesRadar and Nintendo Life suggested that these notices, which were specifically aimed at recent or particularly notable titles such as Breath of the Wild, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, and Xenoblade Chronicles 3, were issued with the intent to discourage users from playing those games on their PCs or Steam Deck devices via emulation software.

Later in November, Nintendo submitted a court filing that sought information of the people who worked with Williams on Reddit, Discord, and GitHub.