A year after causing a stir with a demo of Celeste, Skyline, the extraordinary Nintendo Switch emulator on Android, is closing its doors. In a message published on the official site of the application, the developers explain that their work presents a legal risk, Nintendo having certainly filed a complaint for circumvention of intellectual property. The latest version, numbered 2513, is still available for download on the official website.
Emulation has always been “on the margins of legality”. It’s not the emulator itself that’s illegal per se. It is the use that is in fact. Some users do not own the games they enjoy through the emulator. And, like watching a downloaded movie without having purchased the right to use it, having a “backup copy” of a game that you don’t have an original copy of is reprehensible.
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Under these conditions, emulators should therefore not pose any legal problems, the developers not being responsible for what users do with them. However, some emulators are the subject of legal proceedings for copyright infringement and circumvention. This is the case of Skyline, the excellent Nintendo Switch emulator on Android. We had discovered it a year ago on the occasion of a video published by its creators on YouTube.
Skyline, the best Switch emulator on Android, is shutting down
A year later, we learn with regret that the developers are abandoning Skyline. A laconic message on the official site tells us that the emulator presents a legal risk and that the designers prefer not to sue. Understand, in our opinion, that Nintendo asked its lawyers to send a deterrent letter to the developers. And it worked.
On Skyline’s Discord server, we learn a little more: to improve and update the emulator, the developers had to ” dump the keys to their own Switch. These are keys that allow the authentication of the Switch and the games (anyone who has hacked their Switch v1 knows what we are talking about here). They are used to decrypt the games: the goal is therefore to protect the games against piracy. Skyline uses these keys to operate. And it is this detail that made Nintendo wince.
Skyline therefore stops here after a little over a year of existence. The ultimate version numbered 2513 is still available on the official website. And it will remain so until the creators of the project receive a new letter from Nintendo. This version is quite stable and many games work perfectly. Find below the latest compilation which presents some of the games compatible with the application.
