Is yuzu Still Usable? The 2024 Shutdown and the Best yuzu Alternatives Today

yuzu is shut down. There is no official way to get it, and it will never be updated again. Nintendo sued yuzu's developer, Tropic Haze LLC, on February 26, 2024, and the two sides settled on March 4: $2.4 million in damages and an end to development and distribution. As of October 2026, yuzu's code lives on in its descendants. On PC and Android, the top pick is Eden, followed by Citron Neo.

What yuzu was

yuzu was a Switch emulator announced in January 2018. It was written in C++ by a team from the 3DS emulator Citra, and its legal entity later became Tropic Haze LLC. Before it closed it was the most popular Switch emulator, and with Ryujinx it formed the scene's big two: yuzu generally had the performance edge, while Ryujinx had better compatibility.

yuzu introduced key features that its forks still rely on:

• December 2019: a Vulkan renderer.
• May 2020: multi-core CPU emulation (codename Prometheus), a big frame rate boost.
• July 2021: a rewritten shader decompiler (Project Hades) with a clear overall performance gain.
• 2021: resolution scaling (Project A.R.T.), including beyond-native resolutions.
• May 30, 2023: an Android version, with free and paid early access editions.

It supported Windows, Linux and Android, with macOS only experimental. The final builds were Mainline 1734 (2024-03-04) and Early Access 4176 (2024-03-01).

How it ended (February to March 2024)

• 2024-02-26: Nintendo of America sued Tropic Haze in federal court in Rhode Island, alleging copyright infringement and circumvention of Switch protections.
• 2024-03-04: the case settled within a week. According to the court filing and reporting by Shacknews and Polygon:
  • Tropic Haze pays Nintendo $2.4 million;
  • a permanent injunction bars yuzu's management from continuing yuzu or assisting Citra;
  • distribution stops and copies are destroyed;
  • the yuzu website domain goes to Nintendo.
• The team took down its code repositories, Patreon, Discord and websites. The same team's 3DS emulator, Citra, shut down as well.
• 2024-04-29: a Nintendo DMCA notice to GitHub took down 8,353 yuzu forks.

Seven months after yuzu, Ryujinx also stopped after Nintendo got involved.

After yuzu: one fork after another

yuzu's code is GPL-licensed, so forks appeared immediately. They fared very differently:

The legal pressure continued. In November 2025, the court in Nintendo v. Keighin found that distributing software primarily used to decrypt and run Switch games violates the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, and Nintendo's later DMCA notices cite that ruling. On February 12, 2026, a single Nintendo notice to GitHub named 13 emulators, including yuzu itself and several yuzu forks. Later rounds in March and August kept removing yuzu mirror repositories.

Beware of "official yuzu download" sites

The original yuzu domain was handed to Nintendo under the settlement, and nothing official has been released since March 2024. Yet searches for a yuzu download still turn up sites claiming to be official, some advertising a "latest version." They are all third-party. You can't verify their installers, which may be modified or bundled with other software, and any "new version" cannot be official. See how to spot fake emulator sites.

What to switch to

Eden and Citron Neo both descend from yuzu, so their settings and workflow will feel familiar. To compare them, see Eden vs Citron Neo vs Ryubing.

For keys and firmware, see keys and firmware explained. For the legal side, see are Switch emulators legal?