Dolphin says Nintendo blocked the Steam release of its Wii and GameCube emulators

The Steam launch of Dolphin, an open-source emulator for Wii and GameCube, has been delayed indefinitely (via) pc gamer, A blog post by the developers says that Nintendo will “stop and quit” citing the DMCA (a old version The blog post simply said “issued a DMCA” but has since been updated). announced plans For Steam launch in March.

It is with great sadness that we have to announce that the Dolphin on Steam release has been postponed indefinitely. We were informed by Valve that Nintendo has issued a cease and desist against Dolphin’s Steam page, citing the DMCA, and has removed Dolphin from Steam until the matter is resolved. We are currently investigating our options and will receive a more in-depth response in the near future.

We appreciate your patience during this time.

Pierre Bourdon, who says he was involved with Dolphin for more than 10 years in various capacities and was named in the email from Valve, Mastodon writes in a series of posts The notice was the result of a back-and-forth with Nintendo initiated by Steam and did not include any DMCA notice, calling the action “just a standard legal takedown/C&D between the two companies”.

One element that may be the point, according to Borden, is Nintendo is using Dolphin to justify its request to block distribution of its Wii AES-128 disc encryption. Rather than asking users to provide the key themselves, the software has for many years shipped with the Wii’s “generic key” in its source code.

Bourdon wrote on Mastodon that, unlike a straight-up DMCA takedown, in this case, Dolphin’s creators have no legal recourse to push back. That leaves the group at the whim of Valve, which says it could have ignored Nintendo at this stage without any consequences.

We’ve reached out to Valve, Nintendo, and The Dolphin Emulator Project for further comment.

at least one other emulator, , exists on the Steam platform, although that software does not work in the same way that Dolphin does. Where Dolphin directly emulates the GameCube and Wii consoles, RetroArch serves as a frontend into which the emulator “core” can be loaded, giving users a centralized location to configure software settings for their emulator. Is.