Dolphin Emulator disappears from Steam just before its premiere. Everything, as usual, is to blame… Nintendo

Rather, no one needs to be presented with the question of how Nintendo deals with all types of game emulators from their consoles. Big N has always taken steps to prevent its productions from running on other devices. We have heard about many such cases in recent days. The next one has just started, because the emulator of games from Nintendo consoles: GameCube and Wii – Dolphin – disappeared from the Steam platform just before its debut.

Dolphin Emulator is software that allows you to run titles from Nintendo GameCube and Wii consoles on other devices. It was about to premiere on Steam, but Nintendo stepped in.

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The eponymous Dolphin game emulator has quite a long history behind it. Its beginnings date back to 2003, when an experimental version capable of emulating games from the Nintendo GameCuba was released. Of course, she was far from ideal. Launched games ran at low FPS and had a lot of graphical glitches. In the meantime, the project was abandoned and resumed, but its real breakthrough came in 2007, when it was released to the public under the GPLv2 license. Since then, it has developed quite rapidly and has been updated frequently. But back to the present: at the end of March this year, the creators boasted on Dolphin’s official Steam page that after several months of work, they are extremely happy, because the project will soon (the second quarter of this year was assumed) be made available to everyone and it will be possible to download it directly from the platform. Less than a month later, and more precisely yesterday (May 26, 2023), Nintendo sent a DMCA (Copyright Act) notice to Valve, through which Dolphin Emulator was removed from Steam until the matter was clarified.

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Thus, the developers of the emulator did not learn about the whole matter directly from Nintendo, but were informed by the owner of the Steam platform – as is usually the case with copyright infringement letters. In the document, Nintendo refers to the fact that Dolphin operates in a way that bypasses the security (in short) of their titles, allowing games to run without their authorization. So we have a rather interesting situation, because Big N has two weeks to take appropriate action – that is, refer the case to court or not. Assuming Nintendo goes this route and ultimately wins the case, the fate of other emulators (which work in a fairly similar way) could be the same as Dolphin’s. On the other hand, losing the process, other emulators could be developed without any obstacles. At the moment, the Dolphin emulator is only available on GitHub and on the official website. It remains for us to wait for developments and watch Nintendo’s steps.

Source: Dolphin