Conflicting announcements and news items have surrounded a removal of the Dolphin emulator from Valve's Steam store - the emulation project's development team claimed that Nintendo had sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown order last week: "It is with much disappointment that we have to announce that the Dolphin on Steam release has been indefinitely postponed. We were notified by Valve that Nintendo has issued a cease and desist (order) citing the DMCA against Dolphin's Steam page, and have removed Dolphin from Steam until the matter is settled." This emulation application has been freely available online for many years, but an announcement was made back in March about a forthcoming release (Q2 2023) on the Steam store.

It has been widely reported that Nintendo is very protective of its technologies and intellectual properties - many examples of litigation (against pirating outfits and leakers) have been covered over the past year or two - but according to various sources (emerging over the weekend) it seems that Valve first flagged Dolphin as a potential legal headache. Valve apparently sought Nintendo's opinion about the matter of a Gamecube and Wii emulator getting distribution via Steam. A former treasurer on the Dolphin Emulation Project, Pierre Bourdon, criticized claims of the supposed takedown order and posited the following negotiations between involved parties: In this case, none of this process was followed. To the best of my understanding, this is what happened: "Valve legal contacted Nintendo of America (NoA) to ask "hey, what do you think about Dolphin?" Nintendo replied to Valve "we think it's bad and also that it violates the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions" (note: nothing about violating copyright itself). Also "please take it down." Valve legal takes it down and forwards NoA's reply to the Dolphin Foundation contact address."Kotaku has managed to extract a comment from Nintendo about the complicated situation - a spokesperson replied via email: "Nintendo is committed to protecting the hard work and creativity of video game engineers and developers...This emulator illegally circumvents Nintendo's protection measures and runs illegal copies of games. Using illegal emulators or illegal copies of games harms development and ultimately stifles innovation. Nintendo respects the intellectual property rights of other companies, and in turn expects others to do the same."

PC Gamer acquired a copy of Nintendo's legal notice (issued to Valve's legal team on May 26), and proceeded to publish an article labelling the letter as a DMCA takedown request - they have since updated their story with the consulted opinion of an attorney. Kellen Voyer of Voyer Law (intellectual property and technology law specialists) stated: "I would characterize this NOT as a DMCA take down notice and instead as a warning shot that the software, Dolphin, if released on Steam would (in Nintendo's view) violate the DMCA...Here, there is no allegation that Valve is currently hosting anything that infringes Nintendo's copyright or, more broadly, violates the DMCA. Rather, Nintendo is sending clear notice to Valve that it considers Dolphin to violate the DMCA and should it be released on Steam, Nintendo will likely take further action. Given that Valve controls what is available on its store, it made the decision not to wade into any dispute between the Dolphin developers and Nintendo and, instead, followed Nintendo's preemptive request and took down the Steam page."