Valve’s legal department contacted Nintendo to inquire about the announced release of Dolphin Emulator on Steam. In reply to this, a lawyer representing Nintendo of America requested Valve prevent Dolphin from releasing on the Steam store, citing the DMCA as justification. Valve then forwarded us the statement from Nintendo’s lawyers, and told us that we had to come to an agreement with Nintendo in order to release on Steam. Considering the strong legal wording at the start of the document and the citation of DMCA law, we took the letter very seriously.
I’m now annoyed that I heard huge amounts of baseless speculation at the time but then nothing about this well-presented conclusion of the whole issue. I’d say that technically Nintendo still aren’t ‘going after emulation’ as they know they don’t have any legal leg to stand on, so that stern letter is all they can really do!
When have Nintendo actually gone after emulators? ROM distributors, sure, but all the emulators are still widely available.
Ooh I wondered what the actual story behind that was, it was all speculation at the time. Is that a statement from Dolphin themselves?
Yep it’s on their blog
Oh wow, I can’t believe I missed this! (Link for anyone else who also missed Dolphin’s response
I’m now annoyed that I heard huge amounts of baseless speculation at the time but then nothing about this well-presented conclusion of the whole issue. I’d say that technically Nintendo still aren’t ‘going after emulation’ as they know they don’t have any legal leg to stand on, so that stern letter is all they can really do!