Plans for a Steam release of the Dolphin emulator, software that allows users to play Nintendo GameCube and Wii games on a PC, have been scrapped, the makers say. Developers backed out of a plan to bring Dolphin to Steam announced in March after discussions between Nintendo and Valve left the emulator’s creators in an “impossible” situation: getting Nintendo’s approval to release their emulator through Steam.
On Thursday, the creators behind the Dolphin Emulator Project confirmed that their software has been effectively blocked by Valve and the Steam store listing for Dolphin has been removed. According to a message from the team behind Dolphin, Valve’s legal department contacted Nintendo of America after the planned Steam release was announced. Nintendo allegedly requested that Valve block the emulator’s Steam release, citing – but not legally invoking – the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Nintendo’s lawyers argued in a letter to Valve that Dolphin works by incorporating Nintendo’s “patented cryptographic keys” by decrypting GameCube and Wii software ROMs, violating the DMCA. Nintendo is referring to the Wii Common Key, a decryption key built into Wii hardware that was extracted by a separate group – known as Team Twiizers – over a decade ago and incorporated into Dolphin’s code.
The team behind Dolphin argued in their blog post about the emulator’s Steam release that “only a incredibly small part of our code is actually related to circumvention’, and that the use of the Wii Common Key does not apply to GameCube games. That doesn’t seem to matter much to Nintendo, which generally disapproves of third-party emulation of its consoles and games.
“Valve […] told us to come to an agreement with Nintendo to release on Steam,” the Dolphin team wrote. “Given the strong legal wording at the beginning of the document and reference to DMCA law, we have taken the letter very seriously.”
The creators of Dolphin say they are discontinuing their efforts to release Dolphin on Steam, but some of the features developed for that version of the emulator will still be released. Dolphin is already available for download from the project websiteand is compatible with Android, Linux, Mac and Windows PCs.
“Valve ultimately runs the store and can set whatever conditions you want for any software that appears on it,” the creators of the project said. “But given Nintendo’s long-held stance on emulation, we think Valve’s requirement is for us to get approval from Nintendo that a Steam release is impossible. Unfortunately that is that.”