Why was the Nintendo Switch emulator Ryujinx shut down and what alternatives are there?

Nintendo has shut down Ryujinx, a popular emulator that allows people to play Switch games for free on their PC, as part of a controversial crackdown on video game piracy.

The move represents Nintendo’s latest strike against the emulation scene, a thriving community of enthusiasts dedicated to preserving and playing classic and contemporary games, and follows the legal shutdown of fellow emulator Yuzu in March.

On Tuesday, the download page on Ryujinx’s website became blank, the Github repository (containing the software assets) was removed, and the official Discord server stopped accepting invitations.

Shortly after, Ryujinx’s account on

Why was Ryujinx closed?

“Yesterday gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and offered to stop working on the project and remove the organization and all related assets over which he has control,” wrote developer and moderator “ripinperiperi” on Ryujinx’s Discord.

“While we await confirmation as to whether he would agree to this agreement, the organization has been removed, so I think it is safe to say what the outcome will be.”

The statement goes on to thank the people who worked on Ryujinx and its upcoming updates, including an iOS port of the Switch emulator, which is also believed to be no longer available.

The Standard has contacted Nintendo for comment.

In February, Nintendo sued the developers of the Yuzu Switch emulator, accusing them of “illegally circumventing technological measures designed to prevent game piracy.”

Just a few weeks later, Yuzu settled and agreed to stop development and pay $2.4 million – a major victory for Nintendo that sparked concerns about whether the game would target other emulators, particularly Yuzu’s fellow Ryujinx . Now it seems that’s exactly how things turned out.

The closure comes as Nintendo appears to be on the warpath against those accused of pirating or stealing its intellectual property.

Last week, popular YouTube gaming channel Retro Game Corps announced that Nintendo had issued copyright strikes against it for showing its games on other platforms. For this reason, the channel decided to stop showing Nintendo games in its videos.

Separately, Nintendo is also suing Pocketpair, the game developer behind the viral hit Palword, which has been compared to Pokémon, for alleged patent infringement.

What are the Ryujinx alternatives?

Together, Yuzu and Ryujinx were the two pillars of Nintendo’s open source emulation software, offering users a straightforward way to play Switch games on other platforms, with plenty of fine-tuning options for more advanced players.

Their loss leaves a huge rift in the Switch emulation community. And since the Skyline emulator for Android was discontinued in May, there are now no really viable alternatives for gamers and hobbyists.

However, there are still plenty of emulators that allow you to play older Nintendo games on phones and PCs. The most important of these is Delta, which was recently released for iOS and can run games from the NES to the Nintendo DS. Similar emulators include Citra for Nintendo 3DS games and RetroArch, which also offers Xbox, Sega and PlayStation emulation.

It’s easy to see why Nintendo is targeting emulators. Nintendo’s strength lies in its ability to offer exclusive games on its consoles that you can’t play anywhere else, including games like Mario, Zelda and Metroid.

So if someone gets these games running on another platform and then shares the results online, like Rujinx did by running the recently released Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom on PC, they’re sure to incur Nintendo’s wrath .

Those involved in emulation argue that they are preserving older games at the risk of becoming obsolete to allow others to experience the game’s history. They also often improve existing games with new features like multiplayer support and improved graphics – themselves a cornerstone of PC modding culture.

Specifically, they claim that they already own the games they play and are just using emulators to access their purchased content on other devices.

All of that may be true, but it doesn’t stop Nintendo and others from suing emulator developers for copyright infringement. Although emulation software is not illegal in itself, the problem often lies in how it is developed (for example, does it contain copyrighted software code?) and for what purposes it is used.

Nintendo, for its part, claimed that Yuzu enabled “piracy on a colossal scale” and allowed Yuzu users to play “virtually every game developed for the Nintendo Switch, all without paying a dime to Nintendo” or any other Switch game developer to pay.

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