More than a million losses! Zelda Tears of the Kingdom results tainted by imitation, Nintendo is aggressive
Game news More than a million losses! Zelda Tears of the Kingdom results tainted by imitation, Nintendo is aggressive
The wave of imitations experienced by the last Zelda worries Nintendo executives. Can a legal attack solve all these problems?
Number 1 in sales for 2023 in France, The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom is one of the most significant games of recent years. It became the Switch’s 9th best-selling hit, selling over 20 million copies, surpassing its predecessor’s figures in the same period.. However, certain practices hampered his efforts, which did not please Nintendo executives very much. Indeed, considered illegal by some standards, video game emulation has allowed many users to play Zelda without purchasing it. Faced with this practice, Nintendo was forced to launch a legal attack.
Emulation, an economic solution?
If you’re a fan of video games, you’ve surely heard of emulators. They allow you to play any game on the platform as long as you have a computer powerful enough to run it. There are many emulators in the market, but we can cite as an example Citra which is number one for 3DS games. And contrary to what many people think, imitation is not completely illegal. If you have a copy of the game, you have the right to play it on the emulator, otherwise, it is at your own risk. Being an unorthodox practice, even illegal in some cases, one can imagine that imitation would attract only a limited audience. So why did Nintendo panic and try to sue? Well because in 2023 The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom has over 1 million downloads.
Nintendo and Emulation, a beautiful love story
Yes you got it right, over 1 million copies of Tears of the State were uploaded to an emulation service. It is Yuzu that is singled out here, which is considered to be the number 1 emulator for Nintendo Switch. These million downloads were reached illegally because they were executed before the game’s official release. So Nintendo took legal action against Yuzu’s maker, Tropic Haze Company. This lawsuit seems to work in favor of the Japanese company because, on the one hand, many of their games were distributed illegally before being released on the emulator, and on the other hand, Nintendo has previously won a lawsuit against the same site. . It was in 2021 that the RomUniverse site had to pay over $2 million in compensation to the video game giant for the story of the same people.. Suffice it to say that Yuzu just doesn’t have good days ahead of her.
