Long-standing Switch piracy community shut down after it gained infamy for Tears of the Kingdom mods

Reddit has shut down a three-year-old hub of Switch piracy discussion after the Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom leaks brought it a new level of infamy.

To be clear, it's uncertain whether the shutdown is directly tied to the Tears of the Kingdom leaks, but given that r/NewYuzuPiracy was around for three years but exploded in popularity over the past month, it's not difficult to suspect that there's some correlation here.

As PC Gamer reports, r/NewYuzuPiracy had nearly doubled in size since May 1, when Tears of the Kingdom first began leaking onto pirate sites, and in that time had become a hub of discussion for both piracy and modding of the new Zelda game.

As the name suggests, this subreddit was originally built as a replacement for the similarly-banned r/YuzuPiracy. If you try to head to r/NewYuzuPiracy now, you'll see the message that "this subreddit was banned due to a violation of Reddit's content policy against creating or repurposing a sub to reconstitute or serve the same objective as a previously banned or quarantined subreddit." It seems it just took Reddit three years to get around to enforcing that policy.

While Reddit doesn't have a direct ban on discussion of piracy, the site's content policy does have a rule to "avoid posting illegal content or soliciting or facilitating illegal or prohibited transactions." Despite that, much larger forums centered on piracy - like r/Piracy - have seen no action taken against them, though the moderators of several such forums have taken them private in protest of Reddit's unrelated crackdown on third-party apps.

Other content hosts have been getting skittish in the wake of Nintendo's redoubled efforts to crack down on piracy, as with the confusing aftermath of Valve's decision to remove Gamecube and Wii emulator Dolphin from Steam. Over the past few months, we've seen Nintendo go after Breath of the Wild mods, subpoena Discord over the Tears of the Kingdom leaks, and even suspend legitimate Twitch streams in an effort to crack down on spoilers. Heck, back in 2022, Nintendo even targeted a site that provides images of games that can be used with emulators. 

The best Switch games should only be played on Nintendo-approved hardware, if ya know what's good for ya.