Nintendo Switch: Discord has closed the servers of the Suyu and Sudachi emulators

Discord has shut down the servers of Suyu and Sudachitwo known Nintendo Switch emulatorsand disabled the accounts of their respective creators.

For those who don't know, both Suyu and Sudachi are projects derived from Yuzu codethe popular Nintendo Switch emulator that closed its doors in March after Nintendo filed a lawsuit against its creators for spreading illegal game roms through their channels, including Discord.

As reported by The Verge, the creators of both emulators have only received notifications from Discord with vague explanations about the provision and which refer to the sharing content that violates intellectual property laws. In an official note sent to the publication, the company states that this is a normal process for “DMCA takedown requests”. “Discord responds to and complies with all legal and valid requirements of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In this case, there was also a court order to remove these materials, and we acted consistent with the order of the court,” reads the note sent by Discord to The Verge.

The situation is unclear

The Verge states that the numbers don't add up and it's unclear whether there was a valid DMCA request or whether Discord actually complied with its internal guidelines with these actions.

First of all, the agreement reached between Nintendo and Yuzu in court does not guarantee the Kyoto company the rights to the GPL v3 code used by the emulator, which remains freely copyable, also used by Suyu and Sudachi. Among other things, the developers had declared that they were working to further modify the code so as not to annoy Nintendo and in any case it was not hosted on the Discord servers of the two emulators, precisely to avoid legal trouble.

It is possible, however, that both channels hosted cryptographic keys, firmware or even pirated games despite the precautions taken to avoid such material, given the precedents. However, the situation remains far from crystal clear, given that Discord guidelines suggest that even in similar cases there is no permaban of accounts or closure of servers. The company has not provided clarification on the matter despite requests from The Verge, without which it is impossible in any case to have a complete picture of the situation.

With regard to the future of the two emulators, a source from The Verge states that the fate of Suyu is rather uncertain: there seems to be internal conflicts in the development team, with a part that has separated to work on other projects of unknown nature. On the contrary, the Sudachi developer confirmed to the publication that he is still working on all the projects he had in progress before Discord's measure.