Dolphin is an open-source emulator for the Wii and GameCube. Its launch on Steam has been put off forever, according to PC Gamer. In a blog post, the developers say that’s because Nintendo sent them a “cease and desist citing the DMCA” (an earlier version of the blog post just said “issued a DMCA,” but it has since been changed). This was after they announced plans for a Steam launch in March.
Project Dolphin Emulator:
We’re very sorry to have to tell you that the Dolphin on Steam release has been put off indefinitely. Valve told us that Nintendo sent a “cease and desist” letter to Dolphin’s Steam page, citing the DMCA. Because of this, Dolphin has been taken off of Steam until the case is resolved. We are looking into our choices right now and will have a more detailed answer soon.
Pierre Bourdon, who says he has worked with Dolphin in different ways for more than 10 years and was named in the email from Valve, says in a series of Mastodon posts that the notice was the result of a back-and-forth between Steam and Nintendo and did not involve a DMCA notice. He calls the action “just standard legal removals/C&D between two companies.”
Bourdon says that Nintendo’s distribution of the Wii AES-128 disc encryption could be one reason why it wants to stop Dolphin. Instead of asking users to provide the key themselves, the “common key” for the Wii has been part of the software’s source code for many years.
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Bourdon wrote on Mastodon that, unlike a simple DMCA takedown, the creators of Dolphin have no formal way to fight back in this case. This puts the group at the mercy of Valve, which, according to him, could have ignored Nintendo at this point without any consequences.
We have asked for more information from Valve, Nintendo, and The Dolphin Emulator Project.
At least one other emulator, RetroArch, is available on the Steam platform, but it doesn’t work quite like Dolphin does. Whereas Dolphin directly emulates the GameCube and Wii consoles, RetroArch acts as a frontend into which “cores” of emulators can be loaded. This gives users a single place to set up their emulators’ program settings.
