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.
