> EDIT3: "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, was unlawfully distributed a week and a half before its release"
The game was leaked. How is that the fault of the yuzu devs?
The game was leaked. How is that the fault of the yuzu devs?
That's a list of dumped ROMs. (Posted in 2018, BTW) Notice the "402241866935828490" in the URL? That's the ID of the #support-dumping channel on the Yuzu Discord. Like I said, the Yuzu moderators were very happy to look away when people discussed ROM piracy.
moderator: "Since April 29th, we've had about 50,000 members join"
random person: "Let's be honest, 40k of that was the zombie horde who rushed the gates when TotK leaked"
moderator: "The support we've been receiving has been incredible Very happy with our community, and we're all honored to be able to provide great software to all our users."
The screenshot looks like it's of the Internet Archive, but all the files are marked as not available for download.
... but around April/May 2023 the moderators made it very clear that it's good enough to PRETEND not pirating the roms. (Can't find the quote atm.) And they were discussing among the mods about people joining due to the TotK leak. And there's hundreds of people who ask "Where can I download game XY?" followed by "Thank you, kind stranger, for the link." and then maybe the rules bot saying "please don't discuss piracy in here".
That all combined makes it easy to argue that the moderators in the Yuzu discord were in April 2023 fully aware that they were actively helping people play the TotK leak. And through Discord and their company, they made money off this activity. (Because you needed the early-access build only available to paid subscribers. They went out of their way to make it close to impossible to compile the supposedly "open" source code yourself.)
And the reason why I consider the TotK leak problematic is because the moderators were joking about all the new patreon subscribers caused by it. And that means they were, at that time, fully aware that they are enabling large-scale piracy. And their company was making money off it.
The estimate discussed in the discord was 40k leak players, which at $60 each would be 2.4 mio in lost sales. By coincidence, that also matches the settlement amount that Nintendo asked for ;)