PROVIDENCE – Tropic Haze LLC, a Warwick-based technology company, will pay a multimillion-dollar settlement to a worldwide video game company after being sued in federal court for unlawfully pirating games on the local entity’s platform.
Nintendo of America Inc. on Feb. 26 filed a lawsuit with U.S. District Court alleging that Tropic Haze, through its “Yuzu” platform, allowed users to unlawfully play pirated video games on Windows, Linux or Android systems that were only meant to be played on Nintendo Switch consoles. Yuzu, the lawsuit says, executed code necessary to defeat Nintendo’s many technology features for its games, including “code that decrypts the Nintendo Switch video game files immediately before and during runtime using an illegally-obtained copy of prod.keys.”
On Monday, Tropic Haze agreed to pay Nintendo a $2.4 million settlement, as well as immediately discontinue the Yuzu platform. In a statement posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, Yuzu said its team has always been against piracy and started projects “in good faith.” However, the platform, it says, realized that its projects “can circumvent” Nintendo’s technology protection and “have led to extensive piracy.”
“We have come to the decision that we cannot continue to allow this to occur. Piracy was never our intention, and we believe that piracy of video games and on video game consoles should end,” Yuzu said. “We hope our actions will be a small step toward ending piracy of all creators’ works.”
James Bessette is the PBN special projects editor, and also covers the nonprofit and education sectors. You may reach him at Bessette@PBN.com. You may also follow him on Twitter at @James_Bessette.