Two months ago, the development team behind Dolphin (a Wii and GameCube emulator for PC) announced their intention to release the program on Steam. Today, however, the Dolphin team explained in a brief statement that the game’s release on Steam has been delayed indefinitely after Nintendo sent a letter to Valve stating that the program is illegally circumventing technical measures to restrict access to copyrighted works.
Because of this, the Dolphin Steam page has been removed. The team stated that they are investigating the possibility of solving this problem. There are several ways to develop events. Either the developers will comply with the request and refuse to release Dolphin on Steam, or they will challenge the DMCA request by filing a counter-notice. However, this could lead to a lawsuit if Nintendo decides to sue Dolphin.
Image source: Dolphin-emu.org
Emulation platforms have long been considered legal after a US court ruled in favor of emulators like Bleem. If Nintendo wins against Dolphin, it could set a new precedent in cases against all emulators and break RPCS3, Yuzu, Ryujinx, etc. Probably the wisest course of action is not to release it on Steam, especially since Nintendo has yet to file a DMCA complaint against the project’s emulator site or GitHub page. It’s likely that the Japanese concern is just trying to avoid distributing Dolphin through the Valve store.
Nintendo has been very aggressive lately. The company has already dealt an indirect blow to the homebrew community by launching a DMCA against Lockpick. Ironically, this move is more conducive to piracy, since lockpicking was the only legal way for Nintendo Switch owners to get keys to the games they purchased. Nintendo also attempted to block a multiplayer mod released earlier this year for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, forcing YouTuber PointCrow, who funded the project, and the development team to permanently remove it.
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