Why the best GameCube/Wii emulator won’t be coming to Steam after all (and that’s a real shame)

You were impatiently waiting for the launch of the Dolphin emulator on Steam ?

Bad news, Valve has just imposed a new condition that does not suit the developers…

Dolphin on Steam, yes… no?

It’s a soap opera that has been going on for a few months already, the Dolphin emulator, which allows you to run GameCube and Wii games, was expected on the Steam platform. A product page on the Steam store had even been set up, and many people dreamed of playing Wii and GameCube games on their Steam Deck console.

However, a dramatic turn of events last June. Nintendo (warned by Valve) then decided to block the deployment of the emulator. In particular, the company explained that Dolphin violated the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). The deployment was then postponed indefinitely.

In the end it’s no

Today, the emulator developers published a long post on their official blog to explain that Dolphin will finally not be available on Steam. If the latter continue to be convinced of the merits of their project on a strictly legal level, Nintendo’s lawyers, accustomed to trials, won their case, not to mention a certain reluctance (logical) on the part of Valve.

The developers confirm again that it is indeed the American platform which took the lead in warning Nintendo of the upcoming arrival of Dolphin within it. For Valve, deploying Dolphin on Steam absolutely required having an official agreement from Nintendo. A ” Nintendo Seal of Quality obviously impossible to obtain.

The development team has thus announced the end of the port of Dolphin on Steam. ” Valve runs the store, and the company can set whatever conditions it wants for software to appear there or not. wrote the Dolphin team. ” But given Nintendo’s longstanding stance on emulation, we feel that Valve’s requirement that we get Nintendo’s approval for a Steam release is impossible. Unfortunately, this is so. »

Of course, that doesn’t stop Dolphin from remaining available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Source : Engadget