By Matt Busel, who built the apps, crates and game he writes about · every number links to its source and every dataset is downloadable (methods) · corrections · featured in Kirino, gamebiz, This Week in Rust, New Mobile Life, By-Press
Nintendo DMCA'd 18,615 GitHub repos. 3 ever fought back
On this page · 10 sections
- Key numbers
- The Switch 2 got jailbroken this week. The code is not on GitHub
- Nintendo out-DMCAs the rest of gaming 2.7 to 1
- This is a 2023-onward war, and it is still running hot
- The emulator purge: 17,244 repos, and the forks keep coming
- It is not only piracy: a UI kit, a fan editor and a 20-year-old GBA game
- Why nobody fights back: 18,615 repos, 3 counter-notices
- Follow the money: who wins, who loses
- What this means for you
- Sources
Short answer: We counted every DMCA notice Nintendo has filed with GitHub, straight from GitHub's own public github/dmca archive. Nintendo has hit 18,615 repositories across 90 notices since 2014, more than Microsoft, Take-Two, Epic, Valve, Activision Blizzard, EA and Sony combined (6,793). Only 3 counter-notices against Nintendo are on file, all from 2019. The Switch 2 got jailbroken on October 18, and two days ago Nintendo took down a fan decompilation of a 20-year-old Game Boy Advance game. The scene is not slowing down, and neither is Nintendo's legal team.
TL;DR: 99.4% of the 18,615 repos Nintendo hit were hit from 2023 on, and 92.6% (17,244) were Switch emulators and their mirrors, led by a single April 2024 notice that took out 8,535 yuzu repos at once. Nintendo has filed 24 notices in 2026 through October 23, on pace (our estimate) for about 30, which would beat its 2024 record of 28. If you build anything that touches Nintendo IP on GitHub, assume it is one notice away from a 451 and keep a mirror somewhere else.
Key numbers
| What | Number | Source, checked Oct 25 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub repos hit by Nintendo DMCA notices, 2014 to Oct 23 2026 | 18,615 (90 notices) | Our count of github/dmca (data.csv) |
| Repos hit by Microsoft, Take-Two, Epic, Valve, Activision Blizzard, EA and Sony combined | 6,793 | github/dmca |
| Counter-notices on file against Nintendo | 3 (all 2019) | github/dmca, 2019 |
| Share of Nintendo's repos that were Switch emulators + mirrors | 92.6% (17,244) | Our classification (data.csv) |
| Biggest single notice: yuzu mirrors, Apr 29 2024 | 8,535 repos | 2024-04-29-nintendo.md |
| Nintendo notices in 2026 (through Oct 23) vs 2024 record | 24 vs 28 | github/dmca, 2026 |
| yuzu lawsuit settlement, March 2024 | $2.4M | Wikipedia, Yuzu (emulator) |
| Switch 2 jailbreak ns2jb: published / GitLab stars / forks | Oct 18 2026 / 94 / 41 | gitlab.com/pepsipu/ns2jb |
The Switch 2 got jailbroken this week. The code is not on GitHub
On October 18, security researcher Sammy Hajhamid (@pepsipu) published ns2jb, which he calls the first software-only jailbreak of the Switch 2, working on the latest firmware, 23.0.1. It runs homebrew, backs up saves and mods games. The demo is unhinged in the best way: Codex modded Mario Kart World, "entirely vibecoded in a day", after about two weeks of real exploit work.
Look at where he put it. Not GitHub. The repo lives on GitLab, created October 21, sitting at 94 stars and 41 forks when we checked today. The people who build this stuff have read the same archive we just read, and they know exactly what happens on GitHub.
Two days later, on October 23, Nintendo's agent filed a notice against arthurtilly/rhythmtengoku, a fan decompilation of the 2006 Game Boy Advance game Rhythm Tengoku, plus 20 copies. The GitHub API now answers that repo with HTTP 451, "Repository access blocked", timestamped 4:24 PM UTC the same day.
Nintendo out-DMCAs the rest of gaming 2.7 to 1
We pulled the full file tree of github/dmca (22,417 files), took every notice filed by a game company, and read all 273 of them. For each notice we counted the repos it hit: the URLs listed, or GitHub's own "entire network of N repositories" figure when GitHub took down a whole fork network.
Nintendo: 18,615 repos. Microsoft (Mojang and Xbox, mostly Eaglercraft, a browser Minecraft clone): 3,574. Take-Two (GTA source leaks, the re3 reverse-engineering project, mod menus): 2,457. Then a cliff: Epic 302, Valve 290, Activision Blizzard 107, EA 39, Sony 24 across every Sony unit. Nintendo alone is 73% of everything the big game publishers ever pulled off GitHub.
We left out Tencent (4,247) and NetEase (3,359) because their big notices are not about games: a WeChat database dumper and a NetEase Music file converter. Even with them in, Nintendo still has more than the next three combined.
This is a 2023-onward war, and it is still running hot
Before 2023, Nintendo was a background character on GitHub: 105 repos in nine years, mostly Donkey Kong clones and a 3DS piracy shop called freeShop. Then Switch emulation got good enough to run new releases, and the numbers went vertical: 888 repos in 2023, 9,945 in 2024, 6,149 in 2025.
2026 looks smaller in repos (1,528) only because there was no single mega-network to nuke. In notices, it is Nintendo's busiest year pace yet: 24 through October 23 against 28 in all of 2024. That is a team filing about every 12 days, not a company that thinks the fight is over.
The emulator purge: 17,244 repos, and the forks keep coming
Every big number on this list is an emulator. On February 26, 2024, Nintendo of America sued Tropic Haze, the company behind yuzu, and yuzu shut down on March 4 after a $2.4 million settlement. Eight weeks later came the April 29 notice that took out 8,535 repos in one shot: yuzu-mirror, "yuzu-will-live", pineapple-src and every fork of them.
Ryujinx pulled its own source on October 1, 2024 after a request from Nintendo. Its forks then ate a 4,238-repo notice in February 2025 and six more in March. After that the list reads like a baby-name book for dead emulators: suyu, sudachi, torzu, nuzu, uzuy, luzu, pomelo, citron, eden. Each one gets a notice; each notice spawns the next fork.
Every one of the 77 anti-circumvention notices uses the same legal move. Nintendo does not say the emulator copies its code. It says the Switch's "technological protection measures" protect its games, and tools that get around them are illegal under the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules. 70 notices covering 17,803 repos cite a short list of four copyright registrations, Breath of the Wild among them every time. Zelda has done more takedowns than Link has done dungeons, no cap.
It is not only piracy: a UI kit, a fan editor and a 20-year-old GBA game
The "they're just stopping piracy" defense runs out fast when you read the rest of the list. 732 repos hit were fan games, fan tools and decompilations, things you cannot pirate a Switch game with.
- An Animal Crossing-themed UI kit. On September 3, 2026, Nintendo's outside counsel, Wildwood Law, emailed GitHub a combined copyright and trademark complaint against
guokaigdg/animal-island-ui, a UI library styled after Animal Crossing (the notice says its page displayed the game's characters and imagery). GitHub disabled the whole network: 377 repos. For a UI kit. - Heaven Studio, a fan-made Rhythm Heaven remix editor. The June 2024 notice named its Sprites and Sfx folders. 291 repos.
- The Rhythm Tengoku decomp, two days ago. The notice leans on Micro Star v. FormGen, a 1998 case about fan-made levels for Duke Nukem 3D, to call a decompilation an unauthorized derivative work. 21 repos.
Our read: the emulator fight is about Switch sales. The fan-project fight is about control. Nintendo wants to be the only one who decides what its old games become, even the ones it never sold outside Japan. The same company sells retro games back to you through Switch Online's Game Boy Advance library, so a free fan decomp competes with a subscription, not with piracy.
Why nobody fights back: 18,615 repos, 3 counter-notices
A DMCA counter-notice is how you tell GitHub "this is legal, put it back". It also means sending your name and address to the side that just sent you the notice, and agreeing to be sued in federal court. Against a company that just collected $2.4 million from yuzu, almost nobody signs that.
The archive shows exactly 3 counter-notices filed against Nintendo, all in fall 2019, and zero since the emulator war started. 18,615 repos hit, 3 people willing to sign their name. That ratio is the whole story of how the DMCA works when one side has a legal department and the other side has a Discord.
Follow the money: who wins, who loses
Nintendo wins the scoreboard. Every big Switch emulator that lived on GitHub is gone or forked into hiding, and a notice costs a form and an agent's afternoon.
GitHub loses quietly. It is owned by Microsoft, which filed 3,574 takedowns of its own. Notice after notice says GitHub processed it "against the entire network", parent included. Every developer watching learns the same lesson: the code you love is safest somewhere else. We already showed how much of the open-source world still lives at one address; the gaming scene is the first crowd to leave on purpose.
GitLab, Codeberg and self-hosted Forgejo win the scene. ns2jb launched on GitLab. Nintendo is already sniffing around that exit: its July 10 notice hit GitHub repos named forgejo.
Preservation loses. Decompilations are how 20-year-old games survive on new hardware. After decomp.dev's sunset and now the Rhythm Tengoku notice, the message to decomp teams is clear, and AI tools that make decomps faster will only make the notices come faster too.
Our bet, said with our chest: GitHub copies of ns2jb or the first Switch 2 homebrew loaders show up in a Nintendo notice before the end of the year, and the Switch 2 scene moves its home off GitHub for good. Nintendo is not cooked here, but it is fighting a hydra with a fax machine.
What this means for you
If you build emulators, homebrew, decomps or fan games: mirror to a second host on day one, keep Nintendo's art, sprites and sound out of the repo (Heaven Studio got named folder by folder), and don't put Nintendo's names in your repo name. If you just love these games: the people keeping them alive are working one notice from a 451. Star and mirror the work you want to survive.
The full list is free: every one of the 273 game-company notices we read, with date, repos hit, GitHub network size and target type, in data.csv. More fights over who owns games live under Games, including our scan of 801 Steam pages for AI disclosure, and the rest of today's stories are on Tensorust News.
We make games too, and we'd rather you mod them. O'BLOCK is our sneaker-flipping game, free on Steam. The $4.99 Supporter Pack backs it; if anything in it does not work as promised, we keep fixing it at no extra cost until it does.
Sources
- GitHub, github/dmca public notice archive, full tree and 273 game-company notices read Oct 25 2026
- GitHub, Nintendo notice on Rhythm Tengoku decompilation, Oct 23 2026
- GitHub, Wildwood Law for Nintendo on animal-island-ui, Sep 3 2026
- GitHub, Nintendo notice on yuzu mirrors (8,535 repos), Apr 29 2024
- GitHub, Nintendo notice on Ryujinx forks (4,238 repos), Feb 26 2025
- GitHub, Nintendo notice on Heaven Studio, Jun 17 2024
- Sammy Hajhamid, jailbreaking the Switch 2 (ns2jb), Oct 18 2026
- GitLab, pepsipu/ns2jb project stats, checked Oct 25 2026
- Wikipedia, Yuzu (emulator), checked Oct 25 2026
- Wikipedia, Ryujinx, checked Oct 25 2026
First published here on tensorust.com on Oct 25, 2026. Related: Games, Tensorust News, decomp.dev shuts down, GitHub outages.
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