TLDR
Because Valve asked Nintendo if it was allowed, and Nintendo said it shouldn’t (pretty please), so Valve asked Dolphin to ask Nintendo if they could. Dolphin’s team finds of obviously impossible to accomplish.
I think it’s smart on Valve’s part. With how litigation-happy Nintendo is, I don’t think Valve really wants to go to bat for a program that isn’t even their own, and isn’t even needed on Steam anyway.
Valve is lawsuit averse. They sacked NFT games and AI generated games for similar reasons.
By the same extent, Valve is so based.
I don’t really see the point of adding it to Steam in the first place anyways
Free lifetime cloud storage for my savefiles and an easy way to update would have been pretty sweet…
I completely agree. Emulators don’t belong on Steam.
Steam hosts software. Emulators are software. Google Play and Apple Store have emulators, why is Steam any different?
Because it’s actually a good storefront?
No reason it shouldn’t have emulators, of course, but there’s definitely differences.
Not sure why it was coming to steam in the first place, made no sense. All it would do when you open it through steam is open the dolphin program, the games themselves weren’t being integrated into steam.
Just seemed like a bizarre decision by the devs that was always going to get blocked.
Cloud saves kinda big ngl
RetroArch is on steam right now and that has Nintendo emulators in it. So I dont see why not.
Dolphin uses literal copyrighted Nintendo code, that’s the issue.
No, it doesn’t and no, it’s not. The blog post from dolphin that I’m assuming this article is parroting articulates that perfectly.
It does actually.
Nintendo’s lawyers argued in a letter to Valve that Dolphin operates by incorporating Nintendo’s “proprietary cryptographic keys” by decrypting the ROMs of GameCube and Wii software, thereby violating the DMCA. Nintendo is referring to the Wii Common Key, a decryption key built into Wii hardware that was extracted more than a decade ago by a separate group — known as Team Twiizers — and incorporated into Dolphin’s code.
The team behind Dolphin argued in their blog post about the emulator’s Steam release that “only an incredibly tiny portion of our code is actually related to circumvention,” and that using the Wii Common Key does not apply to GameCube games.
It doesn’t. Encryption keys are not code and are not copyrightable. Distributing them is also not illegal. The word “proprietary” here is meaningless at best and dishonest at worst.
Of course actually using that key to circumvent drm may be illegal, but I’m no lawyer. Send like that would be on Dolphin’s users anyway.
Food for thought: if Nintendo genuinely thought they had a good legal argument against Dolphin, why wouldn’t they just send them a cease and desist directly instead of just getting them kicked off Steam?
