Its not that much of a loss given you can still launch Dolphin from steam anyway. It just won’t be on the storefront.
Yeah, but you don’t get cloud saves or achievements
Can’t complain too much though. Dolphin is so good were spoiled.
I don’t really see the point of adding it to Steam in the first place anyways
Free lifetime cloud storage for my savefiles and an easy way to update would have been pretty sweet…
I completely agree. Emulators don’t belong on Steam.
Steam hosts software. Emulators are software. Google Play and Apple Store have emulators, why is Steam any different?
Because it’s actually a good storefront?
No reason it shouldn’t have emulators, of course, but there’s definitely differences.
There are already emulators in steam, so…
And evidently I don’t think they belong there.
Say goodbye to all the Sega Classics and Mega Man Legacy Collections then.
Rereleases that utilise an emulator released by the rights holders is absolutely not the same as a general purpose emulator and you know it.
Sure but why does that difference matter?
Easy access to piracy.
TLDR
Because Valve asked Nintendo if it was allowed, and Nintendo said it shouldn’t (pretty please), so Valve asked Dolphin to ask Nintendo if they could. Dolphin’s team finds of obviously impossible to accomplish.
I think it’s smart on Valve’s part. With how litigation-happy Nintendo is, I don’t think Valve really wants to go to bat for a program that isn’t even their own, and isn’t even needed on Steam anyway.
Valve is lawsuit averse. They sacked NFT games and AI generated games for similar reasons.
By the same extent, Valve is so based.
Not sure why it was coming to steam in the first place, made no sense. All it would do when you open it through steam is open the dolphin program, the games themselves weren’t being integrated into steam.
Just seemed like a bizarre decision by the devs that was always going to get blocked.
Cloud saves kinda big ngl
RetroArch is on steam right now and that has Nintendo emulators in it. So I dont see why not.
Dolphin uses literal copyrighted Nintendo code, that’s the issue.
No, it doesn’t and no, it’s not. The blog post from dolphin that I’m assuming this article is parroting articulates that perfectly.
It does actually.
Nintendo’s lawyers argued in a letter to Valve that Dolphin operates by incorporating Nintendo’s “proprietary cryptographic keys” by decrypting the ROMs of GameCube and Wii software, thereby violating the DMCA. Nintendo is referring to the Wii Common Key, a decryption key built into Wii hardware that was extracted more than a decade ago by a separate group — known as Team Twiizers — and incorporated into Dolphin’s code.
The team behind Dolphin argued in their blog post about the emulator’s Steam release that “only an incredibly tiny portion of our code is actually related to circumvention,” and that using the Wii Common Key does not apply to GameCube games.
It doesn’t. Encryption keys are not code and are not copyrightable. Distributing them is also not illegal. The word “proprietary” here is meaningless at best and dishonest at worst.
Of course actually using that key to circumvent drm may be illegal, but I’m no lawyer. Send like that would be on Dolphin’s users anyway.
Food for thought: if Nintendo genuinely thought they had a good legal argument against Dolphin, why wouldn’t they just send them a cease and desist directly instead of just getting them kicked off Steam?
They very well might now - valve went to Nintendo to ask about dolphin. Nintendo might not have looked into it previously but now they have. They recently got the android switch emulator “skyline” shut down via dcma. Dolphin might be next.
There’s no chance that a company as litigious as Nintendo somehow didn’t know Dolphin existed or how it works.
They know that they have no chance of winning because Dolphin is legal.
I think cuz integration with steam dick would be more seamless
Please don’t integrate with steam dick
