Nintendo's been on a litigious roll this year—and by roll, I mean in the Katamari Damacy way, where eventually the thing's soaking up entire aeroplanes and grown large enough to blot out the sun as it hurtles towards your apartment in a screaming amalgam of metal and concrete. Where was I? Oh, right.
, taking from the Steam Workshop, elbow-dropping and , grabbing a chair from the announcer's table and slamming it over the head of a , and seemingly being so scary that Valve preemptively just in case the Disney of videogames tried anything expensive and legislatively exhausting: Everything I've just listed was in 2024, by the way, .
from
It's extremely likely that (despite sometimes grabbing emulators to run stuff in the ) the company is merely doing this to further silence any potential shenanigans by Ryujinx's remaining advocates, scattered rummy star to the four winds of Github as they probably rummy wealth are. The cost of a random domain like the emulator's former website is likely a whisper of a drop in the ocean of Nintendo's annual budget, so snapping it up is a no-brainer.
It is sort of appropriately morbid, though—like using the bones of your freshly-slain enemy to build a house no-one can enter. It's the latest move to mark the seemingly fast-approaching dark age of game preservation, if it's not already here. Last year, it was observed that around without using piracy, getting lucky, or physically going to an archive. As the study at the time put it:
"Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape, and maintain your own vintage equipment so that you could still watch it. And what if no library, not even the Library of Congress, could do any better—they could keep and digitise that VHS of Titanic, but you’d have to go all the way there to watch it."
Alas, considering the present wild west of what a company is and isn't required to do in order to support their game, it's likely we'll be seeing these efforts rise and fall in a perpetual game of whack-a-mole, with Nintendo parading around the as a warning to all not to push their luck.