Steam has been much more than just a store-front for a while now. There's a few features that would take the Dolphin team a lot of effort to implement independently but can be integrated without much effort through Steam. A few examples would be:
- Steam Remote Play: Seamlessly playing your Wii games from your TV.
- Steam Workshop: Authoring, distribution, and management of modifications to the emulator.
- Steam Input: A powerful abstraction layer dealing with different controllers and the mapping of their inputs. Sharing and downloading input maps from the community is directly integrated.
- Steam cloud save: Share configuration and save data between computers.
- Steam's multiplayer API could potentially have made it much easier to use Dolphin for multiplayer games.
Most of these things can be achieved without Steam but they're less convenient, more difficult for non-technical users, and yet another thing to manage, update, and keep track of.
- Steam Remote Play: Seamlessly playing your Wii games from your TV.
- Steam Workshop: Authoring, distribution, and management of modifications to the emulator.
- Steam Input: A powerful abstraction layer dealing with different controllers and the mapping of their inputs. Sharing and downloading input maps from the community is directly integrated.
- Steam cloud save: Share configuration and save data between computers.
- Steam's multiplayer API could potentially have made it much easier to use Dolphin for multiplayer games.
Most of these things can be achieved without Steam but they're less convenient, more difficult for non-technical users, and yet another thing to manage, update, and keep track of.