Update: The Dolphin Emulator team has since provided more details on its legal discussions with Valve and Nintendo.
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Original: The acclaimed Dolphin Emulator, the go-to program for emulating Nintendo’s GameCube and WIi games, has had its Steam release postponed indefinitely due to a cease and desist order from Nintendo. The owners of the emulator said as much this week after it was noticed that the software’s Steam listing had been removed from the platform until the matter had been resolved. While people can still use Dolphin Emulator outside of Steam, there’s not telling when — or if, at this point — the emulator will ever actually make it to Steam.
Twitter’s Wario64 and others noticed on Friday that the Dolphin Emulator had been delisted on Steam with the product page no longer accessible despite it being up for the past couple of months after the Dolphin Emulator’s Steam release was announced months ago. Some questioned whether this was an error as this sort of thing can happen from time to time for normal enough reasons, but based on a statement shared by the Dolphin Emulator creators on the site for the program, that’s not the case here.
“It is with much disappointment that we have to announce that the Dolphin on Steam release has been indefinitely postponed,” the statement on the Dolphin Emulator site said. “We were notified by Valve that Nintendo has issued a cease and desist citing the DMCA against Dolphin’s Steam page, and have removed Dolphin from Steam until the matter is settled. We are currently investigating our options and will have a more in-depth response in the near future.”
While Dolphin has been around for quite a while now as an emulation solution for those looking to play some of Nintendo’s older games, it’s been pointed out that in this particular instance, Nintendo might have some grounds for its legal action. Twitter user LuigiBlood quoted the DMCA from Nintendo which said “the Dolphin emulator operates by incorporating these cryptographic keys without Nintendo’s authorization and decrypting the ROMs at or immediately before runtime.” It’s too early to tell what this might mean for Dolphin overall, but it’s safe to say the Steam situation likely won’t be resolved anytime soon.
Nintendo has been notoriously litigious in the past when it comes to its classic games, ROMs, emulation, and related areas. The most recent situation with Gary Bowser is a perfect example of that. While Nintendo does have legal ground to stand on in many of those cases, the company’s also been criticized for its preservation (or lack thereof) when it comes to older games on the Game Boy Advance, GameCube, and other platforms with games that are becoming increasingly difficult to play short of owning the original console and the game itself.
Dolphin should have more updates in the future as developments unfold, so we’ll see then what will come of the emulator’s Steam plans.
