Nintendo lawsuit claims one million copies of Tears of the Kingdom were pirated

A Nintendo lawsuit filed against Tropic Haze has alleged that more than one million copies of 'The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom' prior to its release last year.

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A lawsuit claims that more than a million copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom were pirated before its release
A lawsuit claims that more than a million copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom were pirated before its release

A new Nintendo lawsuit has revealed that over one million copies of 'The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom' were pirated before its release.

The Japanese gaming behemoth has filed a lawsuit against Tropic Haze, the creator of the Yuzu game emulator, which Nintendo has alleged allowed its users to illegally play their games by bypassing its software encryption.

The lawsuit reads: "Yuzu's website acknowledges that the Nintendo Switch's decryption keys (the prod.keys) are required to decrypt games and include links to software that unlawfully extract those keys from the Nintendo Switch."

"As to piracy, for instance, one major Nintendo video game, 'The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom', was unlawfully distributed a week and a half before its release by Nintendo.

"Infringing copies of the game that circulated online were able to be played in Yuzu, and those copies were successfully downloaded from pirate websites over one million times before the game was published and made available for lawful purchase by Nintendo.

"[The] defendant is thus secondarily liable for the infringement committed by the users to whom it distributes Yuzu."