Well that blew up, huh? If you follow emulation or just gaming on the whole, you've probably heard about the controversy around the Dolphin Steam release and the Wii Common Key. There's been a lot of conclusions made, and while we've wanted to defend ourselves, we thought it would be prudent to contact lawyers first to make sure that our understanding of the situation was legally sound. That took some time, which was frustrating to ourselves and to our users, but now we are educated and ready to give an informed response.

We'd like to thank Kellen Voyer of Voyer Law for providing us with legal council for this matter. And to be clear, all of the analysis below is specifically regarding US law. Without further delay, let's begin.

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."

Nintendo hardware enthusiasts have been scouring the internet for more than two decades in search of special prototype Nintendo GameCube consoles - the Space World 2000 expo model has long been sought after by hardcore collectors. Nintendo revealed (at the time) its upcoming home console as well as the Game Boy Advance handheld system at their annual video game trade show held near Tokyo, or the company's hometown of Kyoto, Japan. Space World 2000 (Makuhari Messe, Chiba) would end up being the penultimate show, with Nintendo choosing to not continue with their regular consumer event post-2001.

Consolevariations, a gaming hardware database, this week reported via a blog post that an interesting GameCube prototype was up for sale, following a tip received on Discord, and it quickly became apparent that this slightly bashed and chipped example was indeed one of the very first models revealed to the public at Nintendo's Space World 2000 expo. Several preview units were also demoed on the showroom floor at the August 2001 event, but experts think that these were sourced from the previous year's batch.

We are pleased to announce our great experiment - Dolphin is coming to Steam! Our store page is now live, and you can visit it with the handy widget below. However, due to how Steam works, you won't be able to download the emulator through Steam just yet. Feel free to wishlist us to be notified when Dolphin is available to download on Steam! Dolphin is an emulator for the big N's 6th and 7th generation consoles, featuring enhancements such as increased resolution, save states, and netplay.

When we launch on Steam, we'll have a feature article detailing the process and features of the Steam release. We're pleased to finally tell the world of our experiment. This has been the product of many months of work, and we look forward to getting it into users' hands soon! You can continue the discussion in the forum thread of this article.