Nintendo Blocking Videos Showing How to Emulate Games on Steam Deck

gamerant.com:

Though the majority of people are still unable to get their hands on Valve's handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck, there's an awful lot of hubbub surrounding the device on the Internet. A major point of contention was that of its emulation capabilities, in fact, though early benchmarks show that it performs admirably well in almost all situations.

While emulation itself isn't illegal, the obvious elephant in the room is that of where players using said emulators might be procuring their games. This isn't a major concern for legacy platforms such as PSX, but the fact that Steam Deck seems to be capable of Nintendo Switch emulation, too, is raising red flags for the Japanese console manufacturer and game developer.

Bungie Won't Support Destiny 2 on Steam Deck, May Ban Players Attempting to Play

The popular handheld console and PC benchmarking YouTuber, ThePhawx, recently uploaded a video detailing his testing of the Yuzu Switch emulator on Steam Deck. While performance wasn't perfect just yet, Steam Deck could run games such as Super Mario Galaxy perfectly well at a higher frame rate than Nintendo Switch could, making it obvious that the Steam Deck is an incredibly potent emulation device. Nintendo, however, promptly reacted by taking ThePhawx's video down.

Nintendo is no stranger to using DMCA takedowns to fans of its intellectual properties. At the start of 2021, Nintendo removed hundreds of fan-made games from the Internet in a wide-sweeping DMCA campaign. The company even has a dedicated team of legal infringement specialists that seek out fan projects and showcases to «give all legally-sold Nintendo games a chance to succeed,» and the Steam Deck's emulation capabilities were sure to be contested from the very start.

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