Why was the GameCube and Wii emulator 'Dolphin Emulator' canceled on Steam? The development team tells the story

The GameCube and Wii emulator `` Dolphin Emulator '' developed by open source will be released on Steam in March 2023, and will be released in the second quarter of 2023 (April-June). However, the Steam store page was suddenly deleted in May 2023, and the release on Steam was virtually cancelled. Regarding this matter, the Dolphin Emulator development team revealed that ``Valve, which operates Steam instead of Nintendo, has deleted the store page.''

Dolphin Emulator - What Happened to Dolphin on Steam?
https://ja.dolphin-emu.org/blog/2023/07/20/what-happened-to-dolphin-on-steam/

Game machine emulators are gray in copyright law because they allow you to play pirated game software. The Dolphin Emulator development team said on its official blog that it was notified by Valve that the Steam store page suddenly disappeared because ``Nintendo asked for deletion based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) ''.

Nintendo requests Valve to delete GameCube & Wii emulator 'Dolphin' Steam version - GIGAZINE

However, the development team said in a blog post published on July 20, 2023, ``First of all, Nintendo has not sent a DMCA notice to the Valve or Dolphin Emulator development team on the Steam store page.Nintendo has not taken any legal action against the Dolphin Emulator or Valve.

According to the development team, what actually happened was as follows.

1: Valve's legal department contacted Nintendo regarding the release of the Dolphin Emulator.
2: Lawyers representing Nintendo of America, Nintendo's US subsidiary, requested Valve to stop releasing the Dolphin Emulator based on the DMCA.
3: Valve forwarded the statement sent by Nintendo's lawyer to the development team of Dolphin Emulator as it was, and notified the development team that 'it is necessary to obtain approval from Nintendo to release on Steam'.

In other words, the true flow is that ``As a result of Valve's inquiry to Nintendo, Nintendo's legal department requested Valve to cancel the release,'' and in fact, no legal procedures were taken from Nintendo. However, because Nintendo has a very strict attitude towards emulators, the development team decided that it was impossible to get approval from Nintendo, saying, ``We will abandon our efforts to release the Dolphin Emulator on Steam.'' I said.

Additionally, the development team says it faces bigger problems than releasing on Steam. In fact, the Wii games emulated by the Dolphin Emulator are encrypted, and decrypted using a common key in the chip installed in the game machine itself. The development team incorporated a common key extracted by a volunteer hardware engineer into the Dolphin Emulator code more than 15 years ago in order to decrypt the game.

The development team said, ``No one has ever caused any legal response to the Wii common key.These keys have been open to the public for years, but no one cares.'' However, in a notice addressed to Valve this time, Nintendo pointed out that ``Because the Dolphin Emulator decrypts Wii games, it is caught in the DMCA protection circumvention clause.'' In other words, Nintendo claims that the inclusion of Wii's common key in the Dolphin Emulator avoids the `` technical means of effectively controlling access to copyrighted works '' protected by the DMCA.

In response to Nintendo's point, the development team said, ``We claim that the Dolphin Emulator was not designed or manufactured for the purpose of avoiding protection. Rather, the Dolphin Emulator avoids encryption to achieve interoperability with the Wii software, and it has been confirmed by lawyers that there is no legal problem, and Nintendo's lawyer touched on the Wii's common key ``I wanted to create a precedent for making complaints based on the DMCA.''

However, as a result of the information that 'Nintendo has received a complaint based on DMCA', a large amount of opinions that the Wii common key should be deleted have been sent. While the development team ridiculed those who sent such opinions as `` easy chair lawyers '', ``Wii's common key itself is not important, it is a trivial issue, and there is no legal problem.We had been conducting research and risk analysis before including the Wii's common key in the code, but many people on YouTube and SNS thought that it would be natural to delete it just because it was 'pointed out.' I am sorry.

The development team said, `` Ultimately it is Valve that runs the Steam store, and Valve has the right to allow or prohibit what is handled in its store.As for Nintendo, this case is emulation.