The team behind the GameCube and Wii Dolphin emulators have announced that they are “abandoning” efforts to release the product on Steam.
Valve’s claim is that the Dolphin team “must be approved by Nintendo” to release on Steam, and this is said to be “impossible”.
“Ultimately, Valve runs the store and can set whatever conditions they want for the software to appear on it. But given Nintendo’s longstanding stance on emulators, we see Valve’s requirement for us to get it.” approval from Nintendo to release Steam is not possible. Unfortunately, that’s it.”
The decision follows the announcement in May that the emulator’s Steam release had been “delayed indefinitely” after Valve’s legal department contacted Nintendo and an attorney representing NoA requested the product not be released, citing DMCA laws.
Nintendo’s letter to Valve: “We specifically request that Dolphin’s ‘coming soon’ message be removed and you ensure the emulator does not release on the Steam store in the future.”
As for emulators that use “proprietary cryptographic keys” and include “Wii Public Keys,” according to the Dolphin team, the letter “doesn’t appear to make any claims” that the developers have infringed U.S. copyright by including this key, and the Dolphin emulator is said to be free of “any legal danger.”
After consulting the legal panel, the Dolphin team believes they will have a “very strong argument” in court that Dolphin was not designed for “the purpose of bypassing protection”, as only “an extremely small portion” of the code is involved in bypassing – in addition, “GameCube games are not actually encrypted” and emulators and homebrew can also play the mods and homebrew.
“Considering that only a small portion of what we do involves fraud, we think the claim that we’re “primarily circumventing the law” is an overstatement. We don’t believe this angle would work in the US courtroom, if it ever were.”
While the Steam release has now been cut, “several features in development” for this version will still be released in the regular Dolphin build, such as a ‘Big Picture’ mode with controller support and various quality of life improvements.
You can get the full rundown of how things went in our previous coverage and on the Dolphin blog, but in short – the Steam release is no longer happening.
