In late May, the team behind Dolphin Emulator revealed that its release on Steam had been “delayed indefinitely” after being contacted by Valve.
Valve spokesperson Kaci Aitchison Boyle has now issued a statement (via The Verge), confirming that Valve originally approached Nintendo:
Given Nintendo’s history of taking action against some emulators, we proactively brought it to their attention after the Dolphin team announced it was coming to Steam soon.
And here’s Valve’s full response, which clarifies that this is a legal dispute between Nintendo and Dolphin:
We operate Steam as an open platform, but this relies on creators delivering only what they have the legal right to distribute. Sometimes third parties raise legal objections to things on Steam, but Valve isn’t in a good position to adjudicate those disputes—the parties have to go to court or negotiate among themselves. An allegation of copyright infringement, for example, can be resolved under the DMCA process, but other disputes (such as trademark infringement or breach of a developer-publisher contract) do not have a statutory dispute resolution process, so in these cases we will generally stop distributing the material until the parties tell Valve that they have resolved their dispute.
We don’t want to ship an app that we know may be removed, as this may disrupt Steam users. Given Nintendo’s history of taking action against some emulators, we proactively brought it to their attention after the Dolphin team announced it was coming to Steam soon.
Based on the letter we received, Nintendo and the Dolphin team have a clear legal dispute between them, and Valve cannot judge.
A Nintendo spokesperson previously shared the following statement about the company’s stance on “illegal” emulators and game copies:
Nintendo is committed to protecting the hard work and creativity of video game engineers and developers. This emulator illegally bypasses Nintendo’s security measures and runs illegal copies of games. Using illegal emulators or illegal copies of games hurts development and ultimately stifles innovation. Nintendo respects the intellectual property rights of other companies, and in turn expects others to do the same.
You can get a more detailed overview of the events so far in our original story:
