
Over the past few weeks, a lot has been said about Dolphin including the Wii Common Key. But there are some more serious matters to discuss, some that are much bigger than Dolphin's Steam Release. But given Nintendo's long-held stance on emulation, we find Valve's requirement for us to get approval from Nintendo for a Steam release to be impossible.
#Dolphin emulator controller not working software
Valve ultimately runs the store and can set any condition they wish for software to appear on it. We are abandoning our efforts to release Dolphin on Steam. So, after a long stay of silence, we have a difficult announcement to make. We wanted to take some time and formulate a response, however after being flooded with questions, we wrote a fairly frantic statement on the situation as we understood it at the time, which turned out to only fuel the fires of speculation.

Considering the strong legal wording at the start of the document and the citation of DMCA law, we took the letter very seriously. 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. 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. What actually happened was that Valve's legal department contacted Nintendo to inquire about the announced release of Dolphin Emulator on Steam. Nintendo has not taken any legal action against Dolphin Emulator or Valve. What actually happened? ¶įirst things first - 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. And to be clear, all of the analysis below is specifically regarding US law. We'd like to thank Kellen Voyer of Voyer Law for providing us with legal council for this matter. 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.

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. 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.
