Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Leak and Its Impact
Leaked copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom have caused chaos in no time, even impressing Ganon himself. Emulation teams are on high alert and have banned any discussions about playing Tears of the Kingdom on their Discord servers. To avoid being associated with pirated material, emulator developers publicly commit to not releasing updates to fix issues with the game.
However, those who pirate The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom two weeks earlier are less patient. On subreddits like the bluntly titled r/NewYuzuPiracy, new "fixes" for the game appear every few hours, allegedly offering improved performance or solutions to crashes or graphical glitches.
Emulator developers under pressure
As emulator development is usually open source, it is typically easy to go to Github and see who is changing the code. However, without the emulator development teams already working on Tears of the Kingdom, third parties who have pirated the game have started modifying the code to fix various issues and uploading their own pre-compiled builds of the emulators.
Nintendo steps in
Nintendo has also taken action and apparently submitted a DMCA takedown request to Github over a tool called Lockpick, which is needed to extract the Switch encryption keys to emulate games. As a result, the Android-based Switch emulator Skyline has decided to stop and wrote: "The entire development of Skyline has been discontinued due to the potential legal risks."
While Nintendo has never gone after Yuzu or Ryujinx, users are understandably concerned. Emulator developers have a few more days to hold out - Tears of the Kingdom releases on Friday, May 12th. It remains to be seen if Nintendo will escalate its offensive against Lockpick or other emulation tools as its biggest game of the year sells millions.
Summary
- Leak of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom causes chaos in the emulation community
- Emulator developers are not publicly releasing updates to fix issues with the game
- Nintendo is going after tools to extract the Switch encryption keys
- Android-based Switch emulator Skyline discontinues development
- Tears of the Kingdom releases on May 12th - developers and players await possible reactions from Nintendo
