Given the similar form factors, it’s unsurprising that many gamers turned to their Steam Decks to emulate Nintendo Switch games, but that era seems to be drawing to a close, as RetroDECK, a Linux emulation platform capable of emulating multiple game systems, has just confirmed that it will be removing support for Ryubing, a fork of the now-infamous Ryujinx Switch emulator, from its available emulators. The developer behind the emulator explained in a February 19 blog post that Switch emulation would be removed in a minor update. This comes after support for Ryubing was added in a November update.
The blog mentions two main reasons for the removal of Ryubing, stating that “Switch emulation has consistently been the source of the most issues within the project, generating the highest volume of warnings, bans, toxicity, and support tickets,” and adding that the questionable legality of emulators like Ryubing and Nintendo’s aggressive protection of its intellectual property exposes the volunteers and community involved in the RetroDECK project to undue legal exposure. As of an upcoming update, indicated in an edit to an old blog post to be 0.10.4b, Switch emulation will be removed from RetroDECK “forever,” and discussions about Switch emulation will also be banned from all of RetroDECK’s communities and social platforms effective immediately.
RetroDECK notes that it will still be possible for enterprising users to add Ryubing back into RetroDECK, but they will need to configure it manually or move it from an old installation as a user-made mod without support from RetroDECK’s developers. Any Ryubing configuration files and save game files will remain on user systems after the update, but players will no longer be able to launch them from RetroDECK after the update.