Back in March, it was revealed that the Dolphin Emulator would be coming to Steam. That didn’t last after the launch was indefinitely postponed due to Nintendo issuing cease and desist letter citing the DCMA against Dolphin’s Steam page. Today, the devs at Dolphin Emulator announced that they will no longer be moving forward with bringing the Emulator to Steam.
“We are abandoning our efforts to release Dolphin on Steam. Valve ultimately runs the store and can set any condition they wish for software to appear on it,” the Blog Post reads. “But given Nintendo’s long-held stance on emulation, we find Valve’s requirement for us to get approval from Nintendo for a Steam release to be impossible. Unfortunately, that’s that. But there are some more serious matters to discuss, some that are much bigger than Dolphin’s Steam release.”
Following all of the speculations that came from the initial announcement and the indefinite delay caused by Nintendo’s cease and desist letter, Dolphin addressed what actually happened.
According to them, Nintendo did not send Valve or Dolphin a DMCA against the Steam page. Nintendo hasn’t taken legal action against Dolphin Emulator or Valve. Valve’s legal department contacted Nintendo about the release of Dolphin Emulator on Steam. A lawyer representing Nintendo of America replied to this by requesting Valve prevent Dolphin from releasing on the platform. Valve forwarded the statement from Nintendo’s lawyers, and told the devs at Dolphin that they had to come to an agreement with Nintendo in order to release on Steam.
“Considering the strong legal wording at the start of the document and the citation of DMCA law, we took the letter very seriously,” the Blog Post reads. “We wanted to take some time and formulate a response, however after being flooded with questions, we wrote a fairly frantic statement on the situation as we understood it at the time, which turned out to only fuel the fires of speculation.”
One of the issues that came up was about Dolphin including the Wii Common Key. Wii games are encrypted, and the Wii uses the “common key” that is burned into the console to decrypt Wii discs. Wii software does not have any access to the key whatsoever but engineers found a way to extract the key which did not elicit any kind of legal response. It was freely shared everywhere and eventually made its way into Dolphin’s codebase.
This was brought up in Nintendo’s letter, citing the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, because Dolphin has to decrypt Wii games.
“This sounds extremely bad at a glance (and we certainly had a moment of panic after first reading it), but now that we have done our homework and talked to a lawyer, we are no longer concerned,” the Blog Post reads. “We have a very strong argument that Dolphin is not primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection.”
The devs at Dolphin think the claim that the emulator is “primarily for circumvention” is a reach. They don’t believe this argument would hold up in court.
Talking about the future, the devs at Dolphin say that some of the features being developed for the Steam release will still work in Dolphin’s normal builds, and are still being developed. One of the features is a full “Big Picture” GUI that can be used directly with a controller. Other smaller features include quality-of-life improvements for Steam builds.