Nintendo recently hit the GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin with legal action against its upcoming Steam Launch.
If you are a fan of emulators on the Steam Deck, prepare to be majorly disappointed. The Dolphin emulator was supposed to come out on Steam Deck soon, but Nintendo issued a DMCA lawsuit—citing that the emulator is illegitimate in nature. The Dolphin website was also recently updated to reflect the delays and has promised to provide updates.
The emulator is already a standalone product, but it wanted to branch out to the Steam Deck to broaden its market audience. Some of the best emulators on the mobile console were Xemu, Duckstation, PCX2, Simple64, Blastem, SNES9X, MGBA, Retroarch and Dolphin. So far, Nintendo has picked only Dolphin, as the emulator allows GameCube and Wii games such as Pikmin and The Legend of Zelda to run directly on its software.
The red and white video game pioneers stepped in with additional claims that emulators like Dolphin would “harm development” and “stifle innovation” in the games industry. A Nintendo spokesperson told Kotaku about their cease-and-desist order to the creators of Dolphin, “Nintendo is committed to protecting the hard work and creativity of video game engineers and developers…This emulator illegally circumvents Nintendo’s protection measures and runs illegal copies of games.”
The video game monolith’s representative went on to say that their company has always respected the IP rights of other companies and would hope that others would do the same for them. The main issue for Nintendo was the use of ‘illegal emulators’, as many emulators have been shut down for walking a fine line of legality. Typically, emulator companies only provide the basic framework for game emulation and require players to obtain their own legal games and console BIOS.
However, Nintendo accused Dolphin of using “cryptographic keys without Nintendo’s authorization and [decrypts] the ROMs at or immediately before runtime.” These keys would allegedly allow the emulator to run Wii and GameCube games illegally, thus directly violating their IP rights.
For now, there has not been a clear indication of the outcome of the DMCA, but Nintendo announced that an investigation was underway. It may result in fines or more, so Dolphin would need to re-format their software. Simply removing the alleged keys may be enough to calm The Legend of Zelda mega-giant, but time will tell.
