GameCube/Wii emulator 'Dolphin' is officially not seeing release on Steam
The devs are said to be steaming
Earlier this year, Nintendo hit Valve with a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaint over a Steam listing for the Dolphin emulator, which lets people play Wii and GameCube titles. Valve reached out to the team behind the emulator to let them know of the issue, which is why Valve yanked the listing from their digital storefront…or so we thought.
Shortly after that news broke, it was revealed that Valve were the ones to contact Nintendo about the Dolphin situation, which is why Nintendo stepped in to have the listing pulled before it even released. At that time, the team behind Dolphin was weighing their options to see what they could accomplish, but now it appears all plans are dead in the water.
Today, the creators behind Dolphin say that the emulator has been effectively blocked by Valve, and the Steam listing has been yanked. Nintendo had previously stated Dolphin made use of a “Wii Common Key,” a decryption key built into Wii hardware, but Dolphin team today stated that “only an incredibly tiny portion” of their code is actually related to circumvention.” Furthermore, the Dolphin team says the Wii Common Key does not apply to GameCube games.
Valve did mention that if the team behind Dolphin wanted to release their emulator on Steam, they would have to come to an agreement with Nintendo. There’s obviously no way at all that Nintendo would be willing to work with the Dolphin team for a Steam release, which means the efforts end here.
Dolphin will still remain available through the developer’s website, but any glimmer of hope for a Steam release is now 100% squashed.
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the schaef
10M agoMy friend, who is definitely not me, still has his standalone copy.
That friend is going to continue to shrug at holding onto these "archival copies" for as long as Nintendo continues to shrug at neglecting their industry-leading 40-year back catalog, to say nothing of taking the games that we bought before, and of the ones the even bother to bring forward to a new console, charge us all over again anyway, or better still, make them SAAS.
kuribo
10M agoBig deal. Dolphin has been available and will stay available outside of Steam. They F’ed up by including copyrighted code, however small, in their submission.
that 'however small code' if removed from Dolphin would make it inoperable.
It would make it inoperable to run Wii games. Or they remove it and leave it up to the user to find the keys themselves like other emulators do.
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