Former dev says Steam's takedown of a Nintendo emulator shows "how little people understand" copyright law
Popular GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin is no longer coming to Steam. That's the result of a conversation between Valve and Nintendo, and it's come as a reminder of just how unclear the legal situation around emulators really is.
On March 28, the developers behind Dolphin announced that the emulator would be coming to Steam. On May 27, they announced that Dolphin's Steam release had been "indefinitely postponed" after Nintendo issued "a cease and desist citing the DMCA against Dolphin's Steam page." While that made it sound like this was the same sort of DMCA takedown that struck Switch game-copying tools last month, the reality is a bit more complicated.
After reviewing the letter, attorney Kellen Voyer of Voyer Law told our friends at PC Gamer that "I would characterize this NOT as a DMCA takedown notice and instead as a warning shot that the software, Dolphin, if released on Steam would (in Nintendo’s view) violate the DMCA."
Former Dolphin developer delroth said on Mastodon that, to the best of his understanding, Valve reached out to Nintendo about whether or not it was cool to host the emulator on Steam. Nintendo said no, citing its belief that Dolphin would violate the DMCA by using "cryptographic keys without Nintendo’s authorization and decrypting the ROMs at or immediately before runtime." Valve then chose to delist Dolphin from Steam, and forwarded the letter to the Dolphin devs - and, because of an error in addressing the message, the letter also went to delroth.
The key detail here is that Nintendo has taken no action against Dolphin or its developers - it simply responded to Valve's request for information. In fact, Nintendo has never taken action against Dolphin directly, and while Nintendo's action
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