Did the other commenters even read the article? The article explains that removing the key wouldn't make a difference, because Nintendo is against emulation and Steam is requiring them to get Nintendo's approval. Even if they remove the key Nintendo won't approve, and Steam can block them from the store even if they haven't broken any laws.
A lot of people here seem to think Nintendo would not claim it illegal without the circumvention code or wouldn't write a letter saying that.
This is totally wrong and shows a complete lack of historical understanding of Nintendo and their legal threats and lawsuits going back decades. Nintendo has repeatedly sued even when they lose. Nintendo has even sued companies for making unlicensed games. Not homebrew, but commercially successful games.
Others seem to believe valve would suddenly be okay with it without circumvention code. This seems naive at best, delusional at worst.
That letter includes a threat to valve on distribution. As above, Nintendo isn't going to say "it's fine now I guess". They would happily sue valve with or without the code. Valve may want to partner with them someday.
Valve may be better than most but it seems very unlikely for them to want to die on this hill. The good will does not seem worth the trouble.
This aspect is totally lost on so many people. Even apple partnered with them for games on their own platform.
It’s fiscally irresponsible for company directors to close that door in preference over a hobby emulator, while pretending that it isn’t intended to infringe on copyright.
> It’s fiscally irresponsible for company directors to close that door in preference over a hobby emulator, while pretending that it isn’t intended to infringe on copyright.
I'm not sure if this applies in Valve's case, as I understand it, Valve is privately owned and held by Gabe Newell and what he says goes, so really the question is does he want to do this or not?
I know it's semantics, But I dont think 'financially irresponsible' is the right semantics to use the context.
Gaben could put a video out tomorrow of him burning piles of Nintendo merchandise and swearing that Steam will never do business with Nintendo and both Gaben and Valve would be fine.
It's hard to conceive of how much money an entity like Valve has and how fast it continues to accumulate.
Steve Jobs was notorious for shit listing companies like AMD or Nvidia and it doesn't seem to have been detrimental to Apple whatsoever.
Give me a single reason why nintendo would even begin to consider partnering with valve.
Nintendo is famous for its closed and closely controlled ecosystem.
Partnering with apple to release a mobile game is a bad (outlier) example as nintendo has no capabilities to release their own phone.
Why would Nintendo invite/open competition with steam deck? Why would they make it easier to pirate their games and give steam cut on the sales via steam store. All the while nintendo has their own console their own store.
Its like apple allowed android store on iOS. Sure they could do it but why would they?
You could have asked this question about Sega in the 90s. Why would Sega ever consider partnering with Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony?? And then the Dreamcast tanked and they pivoted to software only. Other platforms were there for them to port all their games. If Sega had done something more boneheaded than "Sega does what Nintendon't" then Nintendo could have told them to pound sand and they wouldn't have a successful platform on which to save their business.
Will Nintendo suffer the same fate? Highly unlikely. The Switch is doing great, the successor will probably do great. But then again, so did the Sega Genesis. There's no need to burn bridges.
> Will Nintendo suffer the same fate? Highly unlikely.
In next you suggest not to discount something "Highly unlikely".
That's basically a Pascal Wager territory.
Building closed off ecosystem is Nintendo's whole business, you making business decisions based on idea Nintendo might upend their whole business is... wasteful?
The odds are low, but we're kinda skirting the real question here: What does Valve have to gain by allowing an emulator on the store anyway? It's free so no platform cut, it's open source so it's unlikely to ever be monetizable, and it's legally dubious on top of all that. If this was some billion dollar piece of software like COD I'm sure Valve would fall on the sword like Sony did. But there's literally nothing to gain here except headaches.
Nintendo historically has enormous leverage on multiple Japanese publishers and developers.
Speaking for previous experience in the music industry, It wasn't uncommon for some A&R or label to become "persona non grata" for personal or "political" (rocking the boat too much with some untouchable manager or artist) reasons and getting the boot from most if not all big publishers and distributors.
I wouldn't be surprised if something similar was going on in the gaming industry.
> Nintendo has repeatedly sued even when they lose.
Why don't we have laws to punish companies like Nintendo for this kind of harassment? What if we had one like "if a copyright lawsuit is found to be frivolous or filed in bad faith, the copyright for all of the plaintiff's works involved in the case is forfeit to the defendant"?
SLAPP laws would not help since they are about public participation - like for example, you oppose a permit for someone down the street, and they sue you for doing so.
Or you express an opinion on facebook about a political figure, and they sue you for defamation.
What we are talking about here would not be considered a SLAPP in most states.
>if a copyright lawsuit is found to be frivolous or filed in bad faith, the copyright for all of the plaintiff's works involved in the case is forfeit to the defendant
That sounds like grounds for trolling in the other direction. Can you imagine some new IP taking off but then being grabbed by some asset flipping company that can outspend the creator?
I think there's also an implied point that the key in a substantial codebase is more legally defensible than the key in a codebase that only provides the key.
In essence, the entirety of Dolphin's functionality provides legal cover for the small amount related to the key, under DMCA exception wording.
I’ve come to the conclusion that people have a really really poor understanding of copyright and the DMCA, which probably stems from a history of normalized abuse by recording industry and motion picture associations. I bet most people don't even know that they’re legally allowed to circumvent DRM in order to maintain archival copies of any media they own.
Like people, Nintendo CANNOT restrict your right to obtain and use the Wii common key for any purpose other than you intentionally and solely helping others circumvent copyright law to steal games. It’s Nintendo’s problem, not yours, if they don’t like emulators. It’s refreshing to see such a thorough understanding by Dolphin and their lawyers.
>Like people, Nintendo CANNOT restrict your right to obtain and use the Wii common key for any purpose other than you intentionally and solely helping others circumvent copyright law to steal games.
okay, can you risk that financially? There are cases where emulators have won in court, and then soon after shut down. And that was a pretty profitable venture too compared to modern open source emulation.
We're not going to properly address this until we have proper precedence to the point where it's a slam dunk. And I'm sure Nintendo chooses its battles very carefully.
> I bet most people don't even know that they’re legally allowed to circumvent DRM in order to maintain archival copies of any media they own.
17 USC § 1201 has quite a few parts (subsections (a) through (k)), but I don't think any of them describe the exception you claim exists. Are you referring to one or more of the time-limited narrow exceptions granted by the Librarian of Congress?
DMCA and copyright in general are huge legal doctrines that it takes multiple years of formal education just to begin practicing. You're definitely correct that people have a terrible understanding of it.
I think what you laid out is something visible in a lot of non dolphin emulators. They have disc rippers available but don't come with the device firmware or games pre loaded.
The article says that they *think* it wouldn't make a difference. I have no position on Dolphin being on Steam but it might have been worth it to try without the key once.
but in this case it wouldn't be a legal admission of guild but it would be propagated as such by Nintendo if there ever is a legal case reducing the odds of winning such an hypothetical case
The reason why Dolphin is legal is based on it being mainly a tool for playing old games you own and potentially with mods, accessibility tools and similar.
So for Nintendo to win a case they would need to convince the judge that it's mainly meant for illegal copyright infringement.
Their argument would likely be on the line of the Wii code without the ability to load legal Wii games is useless and having it would be really strange as you could only use it with illegal copies with the copy protection stripped. And stripping it is always illegal to do. So it would be designed for illegal usage. (And rare new games released that way but they would argue it doesn't matter in the grater picture).
I.e. it would be easier for them to win a legal case against Dolphin without it having been an legal admittance of guild.
They need Valve to not block them for Nintendo without legal case based on some excuses (which Valve as store owner is somewhat allowed to do).
And the one thing Nintendo does not want is a legal case, because they know they are most likely going to lose it and then it's likely not just dolphin which would take advantage of the additional legal clarity created by the case.
In the EU I'm not sure there even would be a case because the law being _that_ clear cut in favor of Dolphin.
> And the one thing Nintendo does not want is a legal case, because they know they are most likely going to lose it and then it's likely not just dolphin which would take advantage of the additional legal clarity created by the case.
Bollocks. Nintendo has a reputation for suing the hell out of anyone, often repeatedly, even if they would likely lose. They're rabid about protecting their IP, to the point where they're infamous for it.
Family friendly front-end, but ruthless corporation behind it. They'd absolutely get lawyers and charge in aggressively.
Valve has nothing to gain by putting their money at risk for someone else's emulator; "no dog in this fight".
But in this case if they lose in court they will lose far more then "just" dolphin being on steam.
And with how it's currently they for sure guaranteed won't see dolphin or similar on steam, a sure fire way which might even be cheaper then suing.
Also AFIK in most cases where they sue they either have a good chance of winning or losing will just lose that case and not set a precedence which can cost them dearly.
> But in this case if they lose in court they will lose far more then "just" dolphin being on steam.
The only thing they'd really lose is the money they already spent on lawyers, and they're more than happy to accept that loss. Nintendo will sue in futile situations just to make the other party miserable.
No they set legal precedence that Nintendo device emulators are legally okay (as long as they don't do anything additional etc.). And publicity, too.
If you considers how many people in this chat alone just blindly assumed it's illegal, and that's given a "more tech affine audience of HN, then that is a huge deal.
Go to your local supermarket and start selling things, let's see how long until you get kicked out by security.
If Valve says no, Dolphin doesn't come out on Steam. If Valve says "ask Nintendo", and Nintendo says no, Dolphin doesn't come out on Steam. Dolphin doesn't get a pass to be published everywhere because what they're doing is legal.
but it's Valve which is blocking them not Nintendo
and sure Valve might do so on behest of Nintendo but it's still Valves doing so
the idea that Dolphine (or Valve) have to asks Nintendo for anything is just completly absurd and beyond any legal basis
which is why Nintendo doesn't use the proper legal methods here IMHO, because then you can dispute it and they can (probably will) lose
but as long as Valve plays along there is nothing much Dolphin can do, so again it's Valve who first needs to be convinced before then either Nintendo gives up or you have a proper legal dispute with them
anyway like you correctly pointed out there is no way for Dolphin to affect Valve so the is no way for Dolphi on steam
Legality is not the issue here. Not everything that is legal can be published on Steam. The people who make it a legal argument after this article are missing the point.
All indications are that the dubious legality of ML-generated art is exactly why Valve is not approving those games. Valve isn't taking a moral stance against ML-generated art, they're playing it safe legally by avoiding distributing such games when they cannot ensure the ML models were not trained on unlicensed content and will not spew copyright infringements.
Valve isn't taking a moral stance against emulators, they're playing it safe legally by avoiding distributing such games when they cannot ensure that unlicensed software won't be run on them and will not invite copyright takedowns.
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Valve doesn't want to carry software that they may be sued over as a distributor.
Until they are on very firm standing that it is ok, they pull the software.
As a distributor of software, Steam has no appetite for distributing any software that may lead it to legal entanglements. Spurious DMCA requests, AI art, or credible threats from Nintendo - that game cannot be distributed.
Valve limited there store to "in general not contain products of a certain type (here AI art containing)".
But in case of Dolphin this isn't the case but a explicit ban of dolphine without it braking Valve TOS.
If Valve would but in their TOS that "emulators are generally not allowed" then rejecting Dolphine would be okay and no one would have wirten any blogs or news articles about it, or even tried to put it on steam.
>They need Valve to not block them for Nintendo without legal case based on some excuses
Or what, they sue Valve? It's still their store. Valve can reject any title for any reason (well, almost any reason. But proving discimination here would be difficult).
I've come across this issue with Valve's vague rulings for dozens of titles, so I'm not exactly surprised the outcome here once again favors Valve. But people are still in blind devotion for Valve instead of realizing that they have been leveraging their pseudo-monopoly on the Pc platform for years now.
They need approval from Nintendo because they include the circumvention code which is illegal under the DMCA. Whether the key is included or not doesn't change anything because the code itself is illegal as it is. But if they removed the circumvention code, Nintendo wouldn't have any right to ask for the emulator not to be published.
No. Valve needs them to get approval from Nintendo because Valve is afraid of Nintendo. They are afraid Nintendo might:
1. Start a lawsuit against Valve rather than Dolphin Team as a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation). Valve could then end up spending millions defending itself from the mad tyrant and the best case is it spent millions to confirm it was doing nothing wrong in the first place.
2. Tell all their 3rd party publishers to stop publishing on Steam, in order to continue doing business with them, utterly ruining Steam.
In both these cases, it has nothing to do with legality or the DMCA, which Dolphin Team's own lawyers have explained if you'd just read the article. It has to do with a big bully getting angry if it doesn't get what it wants, and is willing to throw its weight around.
The interesting question here would be if "Tell all their 3rd party publishers to stop publishing on Steam" would be legally OK or if it would result in a lawsuit against Nintendo because of e.g. anti-competitive behavior.
I see that this could go bad for Valve, but the principled side of me thinks this sets a bad precedent for Value and the gaming community at large to be asking for permission from publishers/developers to green light a tool that helps people play games that are no longer able to be played. (if I am understanding this correctly)
Retro games are in jeopardy of being lost forever because publishers/developers actively work against making it possible to preserve game history.
If that doesn't do harm to the common good, I don't know what does.
Also I doubt they would care about the legality in the slightest. It's not like they would send a press release about it.
It would be an one-time, in-person, strictly private meeting between the respective publishers and executive management. Like the one where they're shown a new console and talk about renewed licensing terms for the platform.
Nintendo literally has a history of this. If you did anything to try and get around their extremely restrictive game selling rules in the 80s to sell more games than you were allowed or games that weren't "licensed" or anything like that, Nintendo would just stop sending you any games.
Nintendo is straight up evil. US courts have told them in direct language that they are wrong and emulation is fine, but they don't give a fuck and the US seems against preventing big money entities from harassing people with lawsuits or fixing the goddamn court system to not cost you a million dollars when you are unambiguously in the right.
That sort of thing can drag on for years. Why would Valve be eager to get into such a fight, even if they feel certain they would eventually prevail? Valve is a business, not a charity or a public utility. (I think a lot of Steam-fanboy gamers are often confused on this point!)
Nintendo would deny ANY and ALL circumvention, no matter how “illegal” it is (which it isn’t, if you’d read the article). Nintendo profits off the deaths of their previous hardware, so of course they will say things are illegal which aren’t. I mean they did abuse the DMCA just a few months back against various legal projects.
It's way more than just profits, look at all the loved games from their past that they continue to not release on digital storefronts or "Nintendo Plus" or whatever they call it now.
Nintendo has an ideological position that essentially the first sale doctrine is wrong and they have privilege over you for things you legally purchased.
no that code is most most likely not illegal at all because there are cases, under DMCA, where code like that is fully legal
this is nothing but a ruse of Nintendo threatening Valve to avoid having to do a proper DMCA request/suing as such an action can be disputed in court, an dispute Nintendo is likely to lose
so it's basically Nintendo pressuring Valve to circumvent proper DMCA enforcement procedures in their favor in a sketchy dishonest way which undermines the law (but might happen to not be illegal)
if Nintendo would think it's illegal they would already have used DMCA to take down Dolphin everywhere, instead of using such roundabout ways
The article says a lawyer firm they hired say it's legal. They dedicate a significant portion of the article to it. So I don't understand how you can just it's illegal.
Nintendo doesn't have any right, in the legal sense. That doesn't mean it's smart for Valve to make an enemy of Nintendo. It's obvious Nintendo uses that pressure. Not legal pressure. The DMCA claim is just pretense.
Various levels of shadow banning is certainly implemented on steam.
This is an edge case which on a worldwide scale is a mess.
For instance in my country, and I guess for most EU (since it was a EU directive), DRMs have a legal protection which is lost upon technical interoperability. This protects on legal grounds the people against digital golden jail/planned obsolescence supplemented with legal locks.
Exactly. Steam can, and honestly must, block them. People don't seem to realize that, of most of the large tech companies out there, Nintendo has figured out that they can easily outspend anyone in legal fees, and no one will care. Just look at their financials. Their lawyers make more than their board. They don't care what is legal or not, they can simply sue anything they don't like into oblivion. They don't have to win the suit to make it disappear.
I hate to bring it up for fears it gets taken down, but how does RetroArch survive on Steam in that case? It doesn't come with them, but you can download cores for Nintendo systems directly from RetroArch.
Valve already knew that Nintendo is against emulation prior to sending the letter to Nintendo. The important datum here is that Nintendo has legal arguments why Dolphin is illegal software and that's presumably why Valve decided to drop Dolphin.
> Nintendo has legal arguments why Dolphin is illegal software
no Nintendo might have enough arguments to make a DACM take down request, but from the POV of many lawyers most likely not enough legal claims to have any chance at winning the dispute in court which would likely follow
this is IMHO why they don't do a claim at all outside of steam
But Nintendo is quite worried about emulation on Steam especially with the Steam Deck. They are obsessed with controlling the games through the hardware and have low end hardware many people would love to replace with something more beefy even if it's not officially supported. So I would be surprised if Nintendo hadn't pressured Valve into an agreement that they would reject and tell them about any Nintendo emulators long before Dolphin tried to go onto steam.
Now due to the lack of DMCA claim and lack of access to steam Dolphin has two choices:
1. give up on it (for now)
2. provoke a legal case in one of multiple ways which would legally clarify if they are covered under law or not (which is expensive and while not very likely there is always the risk to lose it). Through if they are unlucky winning doesn't solve the problem as Valve could just add "no nintendo emulators allowed" to their TOS in which case they would have to sue Valve and Nintendo together for unfair market practices.
... as a non profit project it's pretty clear which option Dolphin can practically take, especially given that you still can put it on a steam deck etc. just with a bit extra steps.
Also maybe Valve just did not want to be the ones to have to fight it in court? Even if they were victorious it takes time from them that they can do other things. Many businesses will settle rather than fight something just because it is more expedient/cheaper not because it is right or wrong.
Absolutely. No dog in this fight. Why risk it? A few months of legal jousting with Nintendo could cost more than any amount of money Dolphin would bring in, and plenty of other Nintendo IPs are sold on Steam. Valve publishes games for Switch, too.
Whole lotta risk for 0 net gain, and possibly steep consequences.
My guess is that in the past they probably had a nice talk where they pointed out they could pressure various publishers to drop Steam if Valve started adding current-gen emulators. Valve sent a letter and published nintendo's response just to make it very obvious they had their hands tied on the matter.
> The important datum here is that Nintendo has legal arguments why Dolphin is illegal software and that's presumably why Valve decided to drop Dolphin.
If Nintendo had sound legal arguments, they would have already won a lawsuit, ergo it is reasonable to assume that they're just being Nintendo (i.e. loudly screaming that emulation is illegal regardless of the actual law).
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
I find it weird that no-one is focusing on the last paragraph of the letter:
The technological measures on Nintendo's consoles and games are essential for Nintendo to protect its intellectual property from piracy. When those measures are circumvented, Nintendo and third-party game developers suffer tremendous harm because, for example, individuals can then use the emulator to play pirated games. Other commercial platforms have recognized these concerns and. as an example. We understand Microsoft recently took various emulators - including
Dolphin - off its Xbox Store
This isn’t an argument about interoperation, it’s an argument about piracy.
In my experience, though there is a lot of lip-service about ‘only playing games you own’, the vast majority of emulator users are playing pirated games they don’t own. This would be a different argument if it was about literally playing Wii discs directly.
[Personally I believe that the copyright terms in computer software like this are way too long, and much (most?) Wii software is really abandonware at this point, and should be allowed to be distributed - but that’s not the law]
The problem is that Nintendo likes to play victim to piracy, surprising considering how their abandoned titles are kept alive by great folks who are only breathing new life into games that would otherwise be lost to time.
An especially egregious fact is that Nintendo uses open source emulators themselves and have re released & sold some older games that are just the emulator bundled with the game, in some cases inheriting emulator-only bugs.
The most recent example I can think of is that the most recent Pikmin release includes dolphin and can therefore be played on a PC with no modification.
That article isnt about Nintendo, only a publisher on Nintendo's store.
The rom thing was only the same rom format. How are you going to tell if it's the same dumps or not? Roms are supposed to match 1:1, otherwise verification hashes projects like redump and no-intro wouldn't work.
Yep. In 2023 you cannot buy a copy of Mario Kart Wii and have the money go to the people who wrote, or even wrote the IP for the game anyways so it’s kind of a victimless crime. Obviously pirating a game you can still legally buy from the rights holder is a different story
>[Personally I believe that the copyright terms in computer software like this are way too long, and much (most?) Wii software is really abandonware at this point, and should be allowed to be distributed - but that’s not the law]
To be fair that isn't Nintendo's fault. It's Disney's.
But I could see Nintendo doing the same thing if Disney didn't (though, it'd ironically be harder to make a case because by that point decades of disney content would be public domain).
It seems odd that Valve would preemptively go and ask Nintendo for their input. Curious if they have done that for other items on Steam. It would seem that if Valve allowed this on their platform and Nintendo became upset about it they could easily point to the fact that the software is easily accessible off Steam and Nintendo has done very little about it.
"It seems odd that Valve would preemptively go and ask Nintendo for their input."
Ah, this is one of those cases where you must apply a decoder ring. Valve literally sends to Nintendo "Hey, for no reason whatsoever we're just happening to ask if you've heard that Dolphin is coming out on Steam?" and Nintendo says "Here's why they shouldn't be allowed to do this with some legal reasoning".
But what actually happened was Valve said "Hey, Nintendo, are you going to sue us for any reason if we do this?" and Nintendo said "Yes". Everyone at Valve and Nintendo are fully aware of the underlying conversation.
One of the most amusing things to me about human politics, and I mean of all kinds not just national-scale governmental politics, are those cases where everyone involved understands that what is being said actually means something else entirely, and despite the fact that everyone involved from top to bottom knows what is actually being said, they still act as if there is some public or set of uninformed individuals who need that fig leaf covering over the real conversation. This is one of the simpler and more obvious cases, which makes it good practice for realizing when it's happening in other contexts. It is a super common characteristic of human politics, this constant playing to an audience that may not even exist, and everyone may know does not exist, yet we must still play to them.
And it happens because it works. We'd all be much more up in arms than we are if Valve had indeed nakedly asked Nintendo if they would be sued and Nintendo simply said yes. That's exactly what happened, and yet, the fig leaf works. (And bear in mind I said more upset. You may be upset now, and it may be justified. But we'd be even more up in arms if the actual conversation had happened rather than the fig leaf conversation.)
They could, but they won't. Nintendo has a history of doing the IP stickler thing rather than the rational, money-making thing. See their approach to YouTube:
I really fail to understand how these big Japanese companies work.
It's like Toyota with electric cars, they could have become a leader in EVs as they had the bulk of the hybrid market (and thus experience), but they kept insisting that hydrogen was the way to go despite actual hydrogen car sales being abysmal and EV (read: Tesla) sales exploding.
I mean, this is a pretty straightforward issue. porting takes money and labor, and Nintendo's labor is limited. You can suggest outsourcing to 3rd parties, but a bad 3rd party port is worse than no port. Some companies don't care (see: Sega and honestly most Japanese companies until Capcom c. 2016 or so), but Nintendo has generally always had a high bar of quality with the titles they publish, and especially IP's they own.
It's not even a Japanese issue. Every company has this issue, but Nintendo is the oldest game developer. So they get the most flack
BEVs are not a sustainable idea. There will come a day when nearly all carmakers will have to shift over to producing hydrogen cars. It is Tesla, not Toyota that faces the disruptive threat.
> It seems odd that Valve would preemptively go and ask Nintendo for their input.
Indeed a much more natural way would have been to ask Dolphin for a statement of their lawyers why they think it's legal run it then by your lawyers and maybe bill Dolphin for that, too.
Afterward you would have done more then needed wrt. oversight of your platform and can let them fight it out in curt.
It makes me believe that either of:
- Nintendo pressured Valve (or just payed well) into a NDA agreement to give them a heads up for emulator cases (seems reasonable to assume)
- Valve has some undisclosed ongoing cooperation with Nintendo wrt. some future products (unlikely, but there is a surprising overlap and I haven been joking around that both should just Team up for their next handheld hardware and just sell it as a locked-down proprietary OS Nintendo version and a unlocked linux OS Valve version ..., nah probably not)
- Valve is somehow dependent on Nintendo, e.g. patents related to handheld gaming consoles or similar
- the decisions wasn't fully thought thru (also quite likely)
It doesn't seem odd to me, Valve already has a business relationship with Nintendo, publishing games on their console. They checked with their business partner before doing something the partner might not like. Even leaving off the DMCA legal stuff, that seems reasonable, and I don't think the DMCA case is as air tight as the Dolphin folks want to believe.
Yeah and if I lit a match and dropped it in my house it'd be a housefire. Calling skins NFTs is patently false, because they are both not tokens and not non-fungible (nametags notwithstanding).
It's not the blockchain aspect of NFTs that is particularly offensive and relevant here, it's the creation of a speculation market for the selling of textures/jpgs with artificially imposed scarcity. The only difference between what Valve does and NFTs is an irrelevant implementation detail; Valve uses a centralized database instead of a distributed ledger, which is a much smarter engineering decision but it doesn't change the fundamental nature of what they've created.
Almost like people just kneejerk react to a bad word but don't understand why they kneejerk.
Sure there are some subteties to a centralized server vs. a distributed ledger, but the core goal is the same: companies want to be a platform owner, allow for generation of some speculative assets for users to trade, and take their cut as a middleman. To my knowledge, it's the middle factor that many have issue with.
Who cares honestly? Why would I want to launch dolphin through steam in the first place? Just adds bloat. Just install dolphin with your package manager and launch it via your desktop environments built in launcher ("start menu").
You honestly can't see a difference between installing the emu via steam on the deck versus switching to the desktop os, mucking about with various packages and configs, figuring out how to make the app show up in the steam ui and then switching back to handheld mode?
Without weighing in on the merits, I didn't even look for emulators in Steam for my Deck. I installed ("sideloaded", if you will) EmuDeck in Desktop mode and that was a much nicer experience. Deck-aware controls and unified hotkeys (quit, save/load).
But also, Dolphin was also the only emulator which needed a lot of additional tweaking from the EmuDeck defaults. Wii games have a combinatoric explosion of control schemes (wiimote, sideways wiimote, +nunchuk, +classic controller, +pro gyro thingy, balance board, light gun, etc) and there are really no sensible defaults. Dolphin won't remember layouts per-game, you need to do some launcher gymnastics to make that happen.
I use emudeck and think it's great, but I'm not naive enough to not see how proper steam integration would make things better. Case in point, it would be awesome to have community support for things like controller configs on certain platforms such as N64.
Linus Torvald rolls in his hopefully far off future grave.
Oh well, good thing end users need to give a shit to use an emulator. Steam or not you don't just download an emulator and have access to every game at perfect settings.
The need to tinker to get everything working correctly is generally down to the sheer number of hardware/software configurations out there, and you see this on Windows and Linux platforms. In contrast, on more strictly-defined platforms - like, say, macOS or the Steamdeck - you know the general hardware and OS combos up front and can optimize around that.
This thing isn't a computer in the traditional sense, regardless of the OS it runs. It's absolutely a good goal to provide an experience where the non-power-user doesn't need to tinker with shit randomly and go down a rabbit hole of options that they will inevitably shoot themselves in the foot with.
Dolphin wasn't made for the steam deck, and I don't think being steam deck verified was ever in the cards. The games it's playing was after all optimized for GameCube or Wii, not any desktop OS. Even if it was, the big problem with figuring out "the right settings" comes down to opinon.
That's the tradeoff for the sweet beautiful freedom of a customizable emulator that people proceed to use as a reason to bash Nintendo for laziness or whatever. If you don't like something running at 30 fps you get to change it. If you don't care about that customization to begin with I question why you buy a steam deck. Becsuse thr steam deck at the end of the say is advertised as 'just being a PC". Up to the ability to ditch Steam OS and throw Windows on as a dual boot or exclusive OS.
> Even if it was, the big problem with figuring out "the right settings" comes down to opinon.
Not particularly, no. The hardware in the Steam deck is a known parameter set and it's entirely feasible to optimize around it.
You're not really responding to my points, and instead seem to be opting to recede into user choice or customizability as a feature. I'm not dogging on either of those - I'm just saying that they don't need to be the default for a platform like this, and to imply otherwise is just weird.
Things should "just work" where they can. Expecting people to become Linux wizards is poor form.
>The hardware in the Steam deck is a known parameter set and it's entirely feasible to optimize around it.
I'm saying that we can't agree on what is "most optimal".
- Do you prefer 30 fps, 60fps, or even higher? those are different ways to optimize it.
- Do you want a pure experience or would you prefer highest internal resolution?
- Do you perhaps want to add in post processing, maybe as a way to get around what would otherwise be visual glitches?
- Preference in renderer? I guess we eliminate DX11/12, but OpenGL vs. Vulkan will give different results, even if Vulkan is in theory the better graphics API.
- and ofc there are preferences on various other nitty gritty settings that some people will be opinionated on.
A switch user just takes what they get and either accepts or grits their teeth with these opinions. But since we're ultimately talking about PC users they will be much more opinionated, and fight amongst one another. Because those supposed "linux wizards" exist and are very loud. I'm sorry if you see this as talking past your point, but my point is that we can't agree. Which ironically enough reinforces my point, I guess.
Some people like the convenience of a single application that saves your settings and backs your saves up to the cloud instead of many different ones you have to micromanage, especially across different machines
I'm sure You can opt into most of that by linking Dolphin as a non-steam game. No cloud saves but you get to launch it through a launcher as people seem to like nowadays.
Alternatively you can set that save backup up yourself with use of your favorite cloud application and symlinks.
Well, that's kinda my unstated serious point in that joking comment: Steam, in a sense, is a package manager but a much better one in many ways so asking to abandon Steam for the system-provided package manager (which may not even exist if we're talking about pre-Store Windows) is quite flippant.
No, but you can download apps via a package manager for all of that. Or use steam anyway?
I'm very confused why people these days are so happy letting one big company manage their entire library and history. Did we not learn from the 2010's?
So the solution to walled gardening is to put everything you care about in the walled garden? Won't that make people even more dependent on said walled garden, expediting the end of the free desktop?
I'd rather see as many popular apps as possible stay outside the garden. The bigger the user base that still uses user-controlled installation methods, the bigger the outcry if an OS tries to lock down a previously-free platform.
To many gamers, Dolphin is unknown, and installing it is finicky. It would foster Dolphin adoption, and possibly Steam Deck adoption and a Switch alternative.
I'm not a user of Dolphin, but an obvious reason is to utilise Steams Big Picture mode as a way to run various emulators. This also opens the possibility of playing over In Home streaming if you have a steam link.
Some setups can be elaborate with Roms listed in Steam / Big Picture with box art, fan art, and various metadata. Software like Steam Rom Manager assist with this.
Considering console emulation is often played with controllers perhaps infront of TV, Steams launcher is probably more suitable for launching emulation than using a keyboard or mouse for a start menu.
You can still add non-Steam programs to Steam to use them that way, so this doesn't even prevent that. This just means Valve is not distributing this over their store.
The Steam Deck community already has scripts for installing & adding to Steam emulators for basically everything in one shot, and Steam isn't doing the distribution of any of these.
Parents comment was only asking why would someone launch dolphin via steam and commented on it being bloat. We weren't talking about distribution because as you pointed out, it has little to do with launching dolphin as a non steam app.
1. The Nintendo Wii U has a portable game controller with a screen on it. Wii U games are designed to be played on this.
2. The Steam Deck is a portable game controller with a screen on it. Wouldn't it be nice to play games designed for this form factor, rather than typical PC games designed for keyboard/mouse, or typical PC/Console games designed for a large screen?
3. Games/Apps on the Steam Deck are most convenently launched by Steam
4. Dolphin emulates Wii U games (as well as Wii and GameCube games)
I was going to say that the GameCube and Wii are very similar to the point where the Wii is backwards compatible but I guess that argument would apply to the Wii U too. Either way, Dolphin doesn’t emulate the Wii U
Yeah, Wii-U has extra hardware for backwards compatibility with the Wii. Wii->Gamecube has no extra hardware, just the ability to disable parts that the Gamecube does not have.
Valve pro-actively contact Nintendo. They pre-emptively took Nintendo's side. Not sure what to think of that. Don't think Valve will ever allow them on their platform.
I don't think I can blame Valve much for this. They aren't so much taking Nintendo's side as trying to avoid shoveling money into a fire. They know Nintendo's reputation for waging expensive and often frivolous lawsuits and don't want to be on the receiving end. So their options are basically 1. put it up then take it down 3 days later when Nintendo sends them some bullshit or 2. ask nicely first in case there is a small chance that Nintendo is feeling nice today.
Sure, it was obvious that 2 wasn't going to work. But maybe it is still better to shut this down before launch rather than 3 days later with extra disappointment after lots of work has been done.
We should blame the legal system that Nintendo is using to bully others.
But Valve does understand (somewhat uniquely) that doing best by the consumer tends to bring in more money - Gabe often talks about this himself. I guess this is one instance where they think more money could be had another way.
And yet they resisted a way to refund games for like a decade until the Australian courts pointed out how illegal that was basically everywhere but the US and they finally conceded.
Valve isn't "pro-consumer", but just "less anti-consumer" because it's a terribly low bar.
They pull in insane money from skins and stupid skin trades on their marketplace and basically invented the gacha mechanics for Team Fortress Hats and crates, including making it free to play to bring in more people for the whales to lord over.
>But Valve does understand (somewhat uniquely) that doing best by the consumer tends to bring in more money
And they do a good job with their PR pretending they back that statement. They simply know to only pick fights with the little guys, in private, to keep that facade up.
They have been explicitly told by US courts like twice that they are in the wrong here and they are not in the legal right to "enforce" their "IP" here because an emulator that was produced through explicitly public knowledge, or even testing against the actual system for correctness is explicitly fair game. This was tested multiple times in the 80s and 90s, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem! was a pretty clear cut case that showed you can literally sell an emulator you have created for a profit and still be in the clear.
Nintendo's "all emulation is illegal" stance is straight up wrong, they know it's wrong, and they should not be allowed to say such a falsehood in an attempt to exert control over something they legally do not have control of. At this point they should be labeled a vexatious litigant and should not be allowed to even file these kind of cases without express approval from a judge.
How is any of their IPs in jeopardy? Emulator doesn't contain any firmware code (at least not Dolphin as far as I'm aware). The encryption key is not IP and isn't copyrighted.
I don't understand how the world seems full of Nintendo apologists. Not in this discussion, I mean across the greater web. They seem to get churned out of the same factory that produces the Apple apologists.
I'm not sure I've ever seen someone who's an apologist for Nintendo's constant C&D requests.
If you're talking about their games, then... yeah I mean they're basically the only AAA studio that's put out pretty reliably high quality games for the past 30-40 years. People want to play fun games and Nintendo provides them.
Just like how people like Apple because they make good computers, phones, etc. We don't all make our tech purchases based on protesting the company's usage of US legal system.
They're not usually here, but they're on so many other websites. Often parroting the "emulators are illegal" nonsense Nintendo puts out. Whenever Nintendo hits the news, the fanboys seem to be all the comment sections.
Same people as the Valve fanboys. If you like something you'll blind yourself to the red flags. It's practically human nature.
See here how people are upset that Valve more or less didn't pick a fight over this for what would 100% be a moral/ethical debate. Meanwhile we see how Epic tried this 5 years ago and they became the internet's worst enemy. All a matter of PR.
Apple and Nintendo "apologists" are cut from the same cloth: they're people who understand how business works and reject notions of having one's cake and eating it too. Personally I hope we get more of these people in the future.
I'd really like to live in the timeline where Valve pushed it anyway and entertained a legal battle against Nintendo to keep emulators on the foreground of gaming.
As soon as I saw this was put on the steam store I knew it was a matter of time until it was removed. Im surprised that Retro Arch has been on the store this long, probably because it doesn’t have any emulator cores for modern systems
I'd say Valve is a walled garden. You can't exactly take your games and put them up somewhere else after all.
I think the parent comment thought it was more strage how so many people were upset that this couldn't be submitted to said walled garden. They actively want to wall themselves further.
I do like steam. It is a walled garden that can be exited whenever one chooses, and exiting is trivial but also requires deliberate action. That's good. :)
> This sounds extremely bad at a glance (and we certainly had a moment of panic after first reading it), but now that we have done our homework and talked to a lawyer, we are no longer concerned.
This is something I've learned by now in the corporate and contract world. Companies and lawyers tend to bluff and fish first. If you have beef with another party and they have a lawyer send you a letter, you will most likely be threatened with everything theoretically possible. Everything will always be jail time, millions of dollars, years you cannot work on this, and you have to give away your favorite potted plant as well.
In many, many cases, /any/ pushback from (even seemingly) legal support reduces this to more reasonable terms. Even just a confirmation of receipt from a lawyer results in interesting reactions.
A case like this would be a landmark battle in the making, I think. Advocacy groups like the IEEE would most likely be all over this due to the weightly ramifications that would arise from Nintendo setting a new unfavorable legal precedent.
I think it makes more sense when you consider how many circumstances in which we do handwritten signatures, yet the recipient of the signature has no intent or method to verify it against your usual signature
Nintendo would have to want to sell games on steam that work with emulators like dolphin. This they are afraid will hurt hardware sales, so it won’t happen.
They should have never tried. They’re poking the bear.
Projects like this that are legal but in the crosshairs of massive corporations need to keep things a little bit less mainstream and on the down low so to speak.
A company like Nintendo doesn’t have to get laws changed to shut you down. They can bury you in lawsuits and threats.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
Then I don't get that you think the key is the issue. This is not a problem whether the keys are legal or not. The article makes very clear that the issue is that Nintendo has to give approval for Dolphin to release on steam. Do you really think Nintendo would give approval if they remove the key?
If they are so convinced that the circumvention code (which is illegal according to the DMCA) is not important, the version of Dolphin that they upload to Steam should not have the circumvention code, which would allow users to only play homebrew games.
The code isn’t illegal for multiple reasons. For one, innocence until proven guilty in a court of law. Can you guess where this hasn’t been? Secondly, the DMCA has exceptions for emulation, which they mention in the article itself. I highly suggest you check it out, by the way; it’s a good read.
If you think I didn't rtfa because I didn't mention that nintendo asked valve not to list dolphin, you are wrong.
If you rtfa, you'll find that the first part of the email nintendo sent valve said that dolphin circumvents encryption, which is illegal under the DMCA. If dolphin were to strip the circumvention code, then nintendo would have no legal reason to ask valve not to list dolphin, and valve could ignore the request.
> valve said that dolphin circumvents encryption, which is illegal under the DMCA
The article explicitly mentions that the DMCA has an exception for interoperability that they believe applies to Dolphin:
> ...a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure, in order to enable the identification and analysis under paragraph (1), or for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title.
>However, we do not think that including the Wii Common Key actually matters - the law could easily be interpreted to say that circumventing a Wii disc's encryption by any means is a violation. As such, it is our interpetation that removing the Wii keys would not change whether the exemption in 17 U.S.C. § 1201(f) applies to us or not. [...] And to all the armchair lawyers out there, the letter to Valve did not make any claims that we were violating a US copyright by including the Wii Common Key, as a short string of entirely random letters and numbers generated by a machine is not copyrightable under current US copyright law. If that ever changes, the world will be far too busy to think about emulation.
Their stance is that Dolphin is not primarily designed for circumvention, but is primarily designed for emulation thus the carve out the DMCA has allowing for circumvention applies:
>> ...a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure, in order to enable the identification and analysis under paragraph (1), or for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title.
>> 17 U.S.C. § 1201(f)(2)
Paragraph 1 requires the person using the software have a legally obtained copy:
> Notwithstanding the provisions of sub-section (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.
They're hinging their view on the word "primary" with respect to functions in the code base: "Only an incredibly tiny portion of our code is actually related to circumvention". That is only one way in which the word "primary" might be applied here, with another being the primary thing users actually do with Dolphin. A glance through sites that have such things shows that available content & downloads aren't homebrew, it's ripped game ROM & disc images.
I'm saying I like this part of the DMCA, or the way Nintendo bullies people around on things like this, but the legal area here is much more gray then the Dolphin folks seem to believe.
I admit I have a mental illness in favor of Nintendo, specifically Zelda. I believe it happened in childhood, the relentless marketing/hype around the games growing up, the magazines that promoted it, the guides needed to 100% it, etc...
I hate Zelda today, but I have a compulsion to play all of them. I don't enjoy it, I think the games are borderline bad quality. I must play. According to chatGPT this is likely some FOMO or desperation to achieve nolstaiga.
I have such ill will toward Nintendo that I can't really have a conversation about it. They have extracted so much money from me.
