Two months ago, the team behind Dolphin (the Wii and GameCube emulator for PC) announced its goal to release the software on Steam.
That plan always felt shaky, as it risked drawing the ire of Nintendo. The Japanese corporation has certainly long been aware of Dolphin since the emulator first launched in 2003 and became open source in 2008, but pushing it on a big PC platform like Steam was bound to attract its notoriously trigger-happy lawyers.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened. Earlier today, the Dolphin team explained in a brief post that the Steam release had been indefinitely postponed after Nintendo sent a DMCA to Valve, stating that the software unlawfully circumvents a technological measure to access a work protected by the Copyright Act. As a result, the Dolphin Steam page has been taken down. The team said they are exploring various options to settle the matter.
Unfortunately, there seem to be only a couple of ways this could go. Either they comply with the request and agree to abandon any plans to release their emulator on Steam (or other PC stores, for that matter), or they challenge the DMCA request by filing a counter-notice. However, that could lead to a legal battle if Nintendo decides to sue Dolphin.
Emulators have long been considered legal, following the US court’s decisions to side with emulators like Bleem. However, if Nintendo won a case against Dolphin, it could become a new legal precedent against all emulators, spelling doom for RPCS3, Yuzu, Ryujinx, and more.
The wisest course of action is probably to drop the Steam launch, especially since Nintendo did not send any DMCA against the emulator’s website or GitHub page. It is likely that the Japanese corporation only seeks to avoid Dolphin’s distribution through Valve’s store, and it would be a shame for all emulators to be affected by a potentially negative court ruling.
Nintendo has been very aggressive lately, striking another indirect blow to the homebrew community by issuing a DMCA against Lockpick. Ironically, that move fostered piracy rather than hindering it since Lockpick was the only legal way for Nintendo Switch users to dump the keys for the games they had purchased.
Nintendo also moved to strike down the multiplayer mod released earlier this year for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, forcing YouTuber PointCrow (who had funded the project) and the coding team to take it down for good.
