Dolphin Emulator is not coming to Steam, why?

Emulators for Nintendo GameCube and Wii, will no longer be launched on Steam.

This information was announced by the Dolphin Emulator Project Team via its social media. If you’re interested in the state of the video game industry, you can check out our other articles here.

Dolphin Emulator is not coming to Steam, why?

In a recent blog post, the Dolphin Emulator Project Team announced that they are canceling the release of Dolphin Emulator on Steam.

Below are the reasons why this happens:

First of all – Nintendo did not send Valve or Dolphin a Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) section 512(c) notice (commonly known as a DMCA Takedown Notice) against our Steam page. Nintendo is not taking any legal action against Dolphin Emulator or Valve.

What happened was that Valve’s legal department contacted Nintendo to inquire about the release of Dolphin Emulator on Steam. In return, a lawyer representing Nintendo of America asked Valve to prevent Dolphin Emulator from being released on Steam, citing the DMCA as justification. Valve then forwarded a statement from Nintendo’s lawyers to us and told us that we would have to agree with Nintendo in order to release Dolphin Emulator on Steam.

Considering the strong legal wording at the beginning of the document and the DMCA legal citation, we took the letter very seriously. We wanted to take our time and formulate a response, however, after being inundated with questions, we wrote a fairly frantic statement about the situation as we understood it at the time, which turned out to only fuel the flames of speculation.

So, after a long period of silence, we have a difficult announcement to make. We are canceling our attempt to release Dolphin Emulator on Steam. Valve ultimately runs Steam and can set whatever conditions they want for software to appear there. However, given Nintendo’s long-held stance on emulation, we felt that Valve’s requirement that we get approval from Nintendo to release on Steam was impossible. Unfortunately, that’s about it. But there are some more serious things to discuss, some of which are much bigger than the release of Dolphin Emulator on Steam.

Dolphin Emulator Project Team

Dolphin Emulator was originally released in 2003 and apart from running on PC, it also runs on several other platforms.

The ethics and legality of video game emulation is a topic that is often discussed in the industry, but Nintendo’s position is clear and this has a chilling effect on the emulation community.