Nintendo has issued a cease and desist to Steam (Valve), to remove the Dolphin emulator, citing the use of proprietary cryptographic keys. They have also clarified they don’t support emulation of any kind, stating it: “harms development and ultimately stifles innovation”. Please check out the videos from Modern Vintage Gamer below for all the info.
Dolphin’s Announcement: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2023/05/27/dolphin-steam-indefinitely-postponed/
Support MVG: https://www.patreon.com/ModernVintageGamer
As you might expect, I have a STRONG opinion on this. First, Nintendo was well within their right to issue a takedown, as Dolphin should have never included those keys. THAT is totally fair and sets a precedent for future theft: They won’t tolerate it at all.
…but saying emulation “stifles innovation” is enraging. I’d like to hope this was just a PR mistake and they meant “theft of games current being sold harms development and ultimately stifles innovation”. While I may not fully agree, that’s at least logical. But to even imply emulation is “harmful” is hypocritical, as they’re relying on emulation for their entire Switch Online’s retro game service. It sounds more like they’re just pissed Dolphin runs their games better than their own original hardware. But I’ll let you all come to your own conclusions about this…
Quoting the DMCA: "the Dolphin emulator operates by incorporating these cryptographic keys without Nintendo’s authorization and decrypting the ROMs at or immediately before runtime."
…this is objectively true. I just checked, the Wii Common Key is in the emulator source code.
— Yakumono (@LuigiBlood) May 27, 2023
