Nintendo reportedly takes down 400+ Switch emulators in massive GitHub purge

Published Aug 23, 2026, 12:42 PM EDT Patrick O'Rourke is XDA's News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint's Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He's based in Toronto. Over the past 15 years, he's written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more. Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University. Sign in to your XDA account Summary Nintendo wiped out over 400 Switch emulator repositories in a single day via DMCA. Most removals targeted Suyu; Skyline and MonoNX also lost several repositories. Forks of removed emulators often reappear online despite Nintendo's legal action. It's been a while since we've heard about Nintendo taking down Switch emulators, with the last notable example being Yuzu ceasing development after the Japanese gaming giant filed a lawsuit against the project's team. However, it looks like Nintendo is back at it, following a TorrentFreak report claiming the company has wiped out more than 400 Nintendo Switch emulator repositories in just one day. According to the report, the main target of the DMCA takedown was Suyu, an emulator that appeared shortly after Yuzu's demise. Of the 401 repositories removed, 311 were reportedly linked directly to Suyu. Another target by Nintendo seems to be Skyline, an Android-based Switch emulator for mobile devices, with had 29 repositories being removed, and MonoNX, a C# developed emulator, which had 17 repositories removed. While Skyline originally shut down in 2023, the fact that its source code is freely available meant other developers could pick up the project and continue releasing updates. Yuzu is in a very similar situation, and if you know where to look, forks of the emulator are easy to find online. It's unlikely Nintendo will ever be able to stop Switch emulation The company argues that the emulators use "unauthorized copies" of the cryptographic keys that protect Switch games It's nearly impossible for Nintendo to get rid of Switch emulator projects outright. As soon as one is removed, several others pop up that are based on the same code as the project that was just killed off. In several of its recent DMCA takedown notices, Nintendo argues that the emulators exist to bypass the encryption that protects its games. "During operation, the emulators at the reported repositories necessarily use unauthorized copies of these cryptographic keys to decrypt unauthorized copies of Nintendo Switch games, or ROMs, at or immediately before runtime without Nintendo's authorization," reads the notice. The majority of repositories that have been taken down link to notices stating that they have been removed. Back in 2024, Tropic Haze, the company behind Yuzu, reached a $2.4 million settlement with Nintendo.