Nintendo Sends DMCA Warning To Valve For an Emulator on Steam

We know how strict Nintendo is when it comes to their games being pirated. In fact they are no stranger to dealing with these kinds of cases where they have an immediate response as soon as it appears, whether it's a romhack of a fan-favorite game or illegal modification to one of their commercially available devices. Recently, another case of bad-doing has appeared in Nintendo’s radar and they have been dealing with ever since. One of the biggest emulators on the market, Dolphin Emulator for Wii and Nintendo Gamecube, was preparing for a big release on Steam, but unfortunately it got caught by Nintendo’s legal team.

Nintendo’s first move was to send a notice to Valve as they own Steam and request them to take down everything about Dolphin. According to Nintendo, Dolphin Emulator violates the intellectual property and Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) rights of Nintendo and, therefore, they have requested a removal of Dolphin. This notice was issued on 26th of May this month and Valve have removed Dolphin Emulator’s Steam page. It was only the Steam page removed though, people who are into emulation can still reach Dolphin Emulator’s github page.
 

 

Since then, the development team got us updated on the matter by posting an update on their blog, stating the release of Dolphin Emulator on Steam has been indefinitely postponed, most likely never to be released on official grounds. Seems like there was a communication between two parties of both the developers and Steam game management about the topic and it was yielded to retreat from this decision in order to keep away from lawsuits and further warnings. Despite being taken off from Steam, Dolphin developers haven’t got any notice from Nintendo themselves about the availability on their website and other file sharing websites, which raises a few questions on why Nintendo didn’t have a direct reach to them.

Atilla Turan
Editor, NoobFeed