The launch of Steam Dolphin, an open-source emulator for the Wii and GameCube, has been delayed indefinitely (by Computer player). The developer blog post says that is resulting from Nintendo’s “stop and desist from invoking the DMCA”. earlier version blog post just said “issued DMCA” but has since been updated) after they did announced plans for Steam’s launch in March.
It is with great disappointment that we must announce that the discharge of Dolphin on Steam has been postponed indefinitely. We have been notified by Valve that Nintendo has issued a stop and desist statement citing the DMCA against Dolphin’s Steam website and has removed Dolphin from Steam pending resolution of the matter. We are currently exploring the choices available and can provide a more detailed answer within the near future.
Thank you to your patience.
Pierre Bourdon, who claims to have been with Dolphin for over 10 years in various roles and mentioned in an email from Valve, writes within the Mastodon post series that the notification was the results of a Steam-initiated exchange with Nintendo and contained no DMCA notification, calling the motion “only standard legal moves/C&D between the 2 firms.”
According to Bourdon, one element that could be why Nintendo justifies its request to dam Dolphin is the distribution of Wii’s AES-128 disk encryption. Instead of asking users to offer the important thing themselves, the software comes with a Wii “shared key” embedded within the source code for a few years.
Bourdon wrote in Mastodon that unlike an easy DMCA takedown, on this case, the Dolphin makers haven’t any legal recourse. This leaves the group on the whim of Valve, who he says could have ignored Nintendo at this stage with no repercussions.
We’ve reached out to Valve, Nintendo, and The Dolphin Emulator Project for further comments.
At least one other emulator, RetroArch, exists on Steam, although this software doesn’t work similar to Dolphin. Where Dolphin directly emulates the GameCube and Wii consoles, RetroArch serves because the interface into which emulator “cores” could be loaded, giving users one centralized place to configure software settings for his or her emulators.
