Personal News
The Steam launch of Dolphin, an open-source emulator for the Wii and GameCube, has been delayed indefinitely (via Gamer on PC). A blog post by the devs says this is due to a Nintendo “cease and desist citing the DMCA” (an earlier version of the blog post just said “published a DMCA” but it has since been updated ) after announcing plans for a Steam launch in March.
It is with great disappointment that we have to announce that the release of Dolphin on Steam has been postponed indefinitely. We have been informed by Valve that Nintendo has issued a cease and desist citing the DMCA against Dolphin’s Steam page, and has removed Dolphin from Steam until the matter is resolved. We are currently investigating our options and will have a more detailed response in the near future.
We appreciate your patience in the meantime.
Pierre Bourdon, who says he has been involved with Dolphin for more than 10 years in various capacities and named in the email from Valve, writes in a series of Mastodon posts that the notice was the result of a back-and-forth comes with Nintendo initiated by Steam and did not involve any DMCA notice, calling the action “just standard legal/C&D referrals between two companies”.
One element that could be the point Nintendo is using to justify its request to block Dolphin is its distribution of Wii AES-128 disc encryption, according to Bourdon. Rather than requiring users to provide the key themselves, the software has shipped with the Wii “Common Key” built into its source code for many years.
Bourdon wrote on Mastodon that, unlike a simple DMCA takedown, in this case the creators of Dolphin have no legal recourse to push back. That leaves the group up to the whims of Valve, which he says could have passed Nintendo over at this point without any repercussions.
We reached out to Valve, Nintendo, and The Dolphin Emulator Project for further comment.
At least one other emulator, RetroArch, exists on the Steam platform, although this software does not work quite the same way as Dolphin. Where Dolphin directly emulates GameCube and Wii consoles, RetroArch serves as an interface into which emulator “cores” can be loaded, providing users with a single centralized location to configure software settings for their emulators.
