While it's weird that they waited so long, emulating Nintendo systems is nothing new. We used to emulate SNES in the late 90s. Nintendo has generally always been the first and last name in quality single player gaming experiences, and their games are always in high demand. There will always be a contingent of people dedicated to emulating Nintendo systems, no matter what Barbara Streisand has to say about the matter.
That's not the reason, you have been able to do so for a while. Even longer if you count Breath of the Wild (which ran with the Wii U emulator). The only reason they got their shit kicked in by Nintendo is greed. Patreon + extra money for early access + wanting to create their own paid copy of Nintendo's online service + timing their press releases with Nintendo releases..
Emulators are legal. Fully intending to profit from creating a competing product isn't. That's why they also gave in so quickly when the lawyers showed up, despite having plenty of money to afford defense.
In general yes, but Yuzu itself probably never was legal in the first place.
At least in the EU and US there are anti-circumvention laws that make circumventing anti-piracy/copy-protection measures illegal in itself even if its done on games you own. Since Yuzu used the prod.keys to decrypt the games, it most likely already broke these laws.
My conspiracy theory is that the Switch 2 is going to operate on the same architecture, but have better hardware. My guess is for backwards compatabiliy. This means that on launch day, Yuzu was likely still going to be the best way to play Switch 2 games. Basically it's a threat to a console that isn't even out yet. Just a theory.
I figure there's enough differences that they want to scare protentional devs from making the changes needed for it to work on Switch 2. They knew that getting rid of an existing open source emulator wasn't really possible, but is a new one is not made, then its not just a matter of sharing copies.
But given that consoles are becoming more and more PC-like, I wonder how hard it will be to make an emulator anyways.
Ah yes. I remember. 1997, I was 12, I had my own computer, and I’d be in my room all day just playing with my NESticle. And then, a little later, pNES.
It wasn’t so much a “wait” as that the reliability of emulation has now caught up with products they’re currently selling. But now I’m curious if this ever happened with the GBA or other handheld consoles that were a bit easier to emulate.