I do wonder if this is specifically what got them, would probably take a lemmy lawyer to unpack it, but I would have to imagine if they didn't have a patreon and basically a company, it would have been much harder for Nintendo to do anything about them. And I would also imagine in retrospect whatever money they got was not worth it when it ends like this.

I always assume when people operate services like this, that they host it in a country like Russia that's less likely to care about takedowns by western corpos and done anonymously as possible. Even though it's just an emulator, you would think they wouldn't be so brazen as to have a patreon which I'm sure requires someone's identity/billing info. They probably still could have been tracked down if they took crypto donations or something like that, but you would think that would be the first choice over putting a giant target on their backs. Patreon is obviously just gonna hand over whatever info they are asked to give when served a warrent, and so is Discord for that matter if they had any personal info on there too.