Nintendo Takes Down Yuzu

News of Nintendo’s lawsuit against Yuzu was hard to miss last month. The video game behemoth finally came after the popular open-source Nintendo Switch emulator that proved extremely popular on Steam Deck – even briefly featuring in a Valve promotional image before the mistake was realized and the image updated.

The whole debacle was over distressingly quickly, with Nintendo filing a suit against Yuzu developer’s Tropic Haze LLC on February 26 and Yuzu agreeing to settle just a week later on March 4 for $2.4 million while ceasing distribution of Yuzu and its source code, and granting possession of the development team’s domains to Nintendo. The agreement also affected Tropic Haze’s other popular software, the “Citra” 3DS emulator, which was caught in the conflict and disappeared in step with Yuzu.

Nintendo fired off a lot of accusations in its lawsuit, and there’s lots of speculation about what, exactly, made the case against Tropic Haze – as if the intimidation of Nintendo’s check book wasn’t enough to scare the developers into submission – but the general consensus seems to be that Tropic Haze’s Patreon offering, where it provided “donors” early release versions of Yuzu, cinched the case against it. It doesn’t help that Nintendo claimed the developers saw an increase in profits when The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom leaked early and was playable on Yuzu.

There’s lots of concern floating around about what the case against Tropic Haze will mean for emulation and emulator developers but, for now, it seems to just be a lesson learned. Copies of Yuzu based on its open source code have already come and gone, with some (rather on the nose) versions like Suyu promising to steer clear of litigation by never profiting and actively condemning piracy on the platform.

Steam Annual Summary 2023 Released

Valve’s Steam “Year In Review”, now called the Annual Summary, arrived in late February detailing all of Valve’s accomplishments in the previous year. The report can help guide the industry, so it’s great news that handheld PCs were front and center.

Of course, 2023 was the year of the Steam Deck OLED, which Valve notes was a significant hardware upgrade that brought new features like HDR with it. The Deck Verified program also continued to expand in a big way, with Valve noting a total of 12,000 games marked as Playable or Verified at the time of the report. Remember to check out and contribute to ProtonDB to let the community know when a title the program hasn’t touched yet plays well with the Steam Deck.

It's also good to see that the success of handheld PCs is benefitting users beyond the still-niche ecosystem: any Steam users partial to a controller and couch play benefitted from the Steam Desktop Update, which brought the Steam Deck’s UI to Big Picture Mode.

Valve also took the time, while recounting all its Steam Deck accomplishments of last year, to shout out the competition! Mentioning the ROG Ally, the OneXPlayer OneXFly, and the Ayaneo Air by name. Classy. But not entirely removed of self-service. A win for PC ecosystems is a win for Valve, afterall.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, so be sure to take a look at the full report.

In Other News…

Gamer’s Nexus Formally Reviews the Steam Deck OLED

Known for their detailed hardware analysis, YouTube channel Gamer’s Nexus released its formal review of the Steam Deck OLED, comparing the revamped Steam Deck to its competition and predecessor with detailed benchmarks.

The channel had previously released a teardown of the Steam Deck OLED that was extremely interesting, but this benchmark-focused review might be more helpful to your average gamer looking to weigh their options.

Xbox Handheld Speculation

There was a fair bit of speculation (that’s still brewing) as to whether Microsoft plans to release a handheld console of its own, largely spurred by confirmation that new hardware would be announced towards the end of this year during an Xbox Live podcast with Xbox President, Sarah Bond, and Microsoft Head of Gaming, Phil Spencer.

While there’s no solid reason to suspect it’s a handheld that Xbox is cooking up next, Spencer has been toying with fans who are smitten with the idea on social media. But, then, he’s admitted that Windows is rather weak on handhelds so many the medium just has a residence in his head at the moment.

Mesa 24 Brings Faster Ray Tracing

The release of Persona 3 Reload saw a succession of Steam Deck updates to improve its performance. We followed the coverage on Steam Deck HQ ^[1][2][3], which outlined a game that didn’t really play well on Steam Deck at the beginning of the month, to a 60 FPS game on stable release of Mesa 24 by the month’s end. Always welcome to see rapid compatibility updates for popular games.

And Some Issues…

Some Users Report “Black Screen of Death”

A few more Reddit users than usual seemed to have reported receiving a “Black Screen of Death” on the r/SteamDeck SubReddit and the conversation received some renewed attention. Whether the issue is particularly widespread isn’t confirmed, users reported screens that were unable to turn on after a fully-drained battery despite normal audio behavior.

The brief spike in these complaints seems to have died down a little since the month’s end, but there are still a few reports.

If you experience this issue, check out iFixIt’s troubleshooting steps, or contact Valve for an RMA.

“Verifying Installation” Glitch Comes and Goes

A glitch that, while annoying, wasn’t so disastrous briefly affected the Steam Deck in February. It resulted in the Steam Deck infinitely verifying its installation while entering Remote Play sessions. Some users experienced a similar error where the Steam Deck would simply verify its installation every time it switched from Desktop to gaming mode (we experienced this part of the glitch).

Valve fixed both errors in a small February 28 update.

What Are We Playing?

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

With all this talk of emulation, I felt like playing something nostalgic. Since I don’t need to emulate most of my favorite games from my first console, the Playstation 1 – Spyro and Crash Bandicoot being re-released and all – I went for the game I remember playing at my neighbors before I bought my own N64 much later, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Just as fun as I remember.