Valve has removed the Steam listing for Dolphin, a popular GameCube and Wii emulator, after the company received a cease and desist letter from Nintendo, the developers behind the project claim. The company behind it Mario And zelda accuses the emulator of illegally circumventing its protections, saying it merely protects the “hard work and creativity of video game engineers and developers”.
An entry for Dolphin in Valve’s digital storefront first appeared in March. “We’re excited to announce our amazing experiment – Dolphin is coming to Steam!” the makers wrote at the time. While the open-source project has been available online for years, interest in retro emulators has since grown Release of the Steam Deckand an official store page would create the tool even easier to access.
However, on May 27, Dolphin’s developers announced that the Steam port would be “indefinitely postponed” after Valve removed the listing after discussions with Nintendo. “It is with great disappointment that we have to announce that the release of Dolphin on Steam has been postponed indefinitely,” the emulator team wrote an update to the blog of the project. “Valve has informed us that Nintendo has issued a cease-and-desist letter invoking the DMCA against Dolphin’s Steam site and has removed Dolphin from Steam until the matter is resolved. We are currently evaluating our options and will receive a more detailed response in the near future.”
According to a copy of the imprint reviewed by PC gamerNintendo accuses Dolphin of “using cryptographic keys without Nintendo’s permission and decrypting the ROMs at runtime or just before”. While the emulation itself is legal, it offers users ways to bypass protections on individual game ROMs may infringe on Nintendo’s intellectual property rights. It’s an issue that should be resolved in court, although the power imbalance between big corporations and homebrew projects like Dolphin means it’s a rare occurrence.
“Nintendo is committed to protecting the hard work and creativity of video game engineers and developers,” said a Nintendo spokesperson my city in an email. “This emulator illegally bypasses Nintendo’s protections and runs illegal copies of games. Using illegal emulators or illegal copies of games hurts development and ultimately hampers innovation. Nintendo respects the intellectual property rights of other companies and in turn expects others to do the same.”
While the company rarely looks the other way when it comes to the piracy of its games Tools that might make it easier (like mod chips sold online) Nintendo has been particularly aggressive lately in fighting leaks and what it considers illegal misuse of its games and technology. A summons was issued in February Discord for the personal information by someone suspected of leaking the officer The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Art A book. In April, it issued several copyright warnings against it dozens more popular breath of the wild Gameplay videos on YouTube which was based on modified versions of the game. And in May there appeared to be a Switch emulation tool, Lotpick, removed from Github for illegal copies of Tears of the Kingdom started spreading like wildfire across the internet even before the official release of the game.
It’s not yet clear how Dolphin’s current developers will react, or how willing Valve will be to bring the store side back unless the matter goes to court, which could take years. Last year, valve accidentallyThe switch emulator Yuzu is included in the scope of delivery in his Steam Deck YouTube trailer. The video was later edited and re-uploaded to remove the attribution. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
