Dolphin, the popular Gamecube and Wii emulator, was scheduled to release on Steam sometimes this year. The release is now “indefinitely postponed” after legal action from Nintendo.

DMCA Cease & Desist sent from Nintendo for Dolphin Wii emulator

Nintendo have apparently sent a DMCA-related Cease and Desist to Valve (owners of Steam) to stop Dolphin from being released on the popular gaming platform.

This was initially announced on the emulator’s official blog, with a short message:

It is with much disappointment that we have to announce that the Dolphin on Steam release has been indefinitely postponed. We were notified by Valve that Nintendo has issued a cease and desist citing the DMCA against Dolphin’s Steam page, and have removed Dolphin from Steam until the matter is settled. We are currently investigating our options and will have a more in-depth response in the near future.

We appreciate your patience in the meantime.

Cryptographic keys for Wii included with Dolphin

Emulation is, generally speaking, legal, so a takedown request by Nintendo on the Dolphin emulator was initially met with surprise, sometimes anger, by the community.

However, allegedly, the Dolphin emulator ships with some Wii specific encryption keys, which might give ground to Nintendo’s legal action. In practice though, it feels strange that Nintendo would go after Dolphin only now, when the emulator has been around for ages. In particular, it is surprising that the DMCA request doesn’t extend to the github page of the emulator.

But it would make sense that Nintendo are deciding to “contain” Dolphin at the Steam gates, fearing it would bring uncontrollable popularity to the emulator. From my perspective, the message is “we’ve been tolerating you so far because you’re (all things considered) relatively small, but don’t push it”.

Now, if indeed the encryption keys are the issue, I feel there are multiple ways Dolphin could get back in the clear, starting with the simple fix of not including the keys in their Steam release, and asking users to provide it themselves. How users acquire the key in the first place is a different matter, although the Wii has been fully hacked for so long it’s not really a concern. That might not be enough however, and maybe Dolphin will just never see a Steam page.

It does appear however that Nintendo are back to flexing their bully muscles, sending legal action left and right to developers in the homebrew community.

MVG has a pretty good summary of the situation (video below)

Pierre Bourdon, who was treasurer of the Dolphin association until recently, has a pretty detailed summary of the situation here. In particular, he mentions this was 100% a decision made between Nintendo and Valve, and Dolphin were not directly contacted (except by Steam to let them know of the decision):

In this case, none of this process was followed. To the best of my understanding, this is what happened:

1. Valve legal contacted Nintendo of America to ask “hey, what do you think about Dolphin?”
2. Nintendo replied to Valve “we think it’s bad and also that it violates the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions” (note: nothing about violating copyright itself). Also “please take it down”.
3. Valve legal takes it down and forwards NoA’s reply to the Dolphin Foundation contact address.

You can still Download Dolphin

Dolphin remains available from their download page at https://dolphin-emu.org/download/, and other emulators (which do not ship with keys) such as Retroarch, remain available on Steam.