“Why Nintendo Blocked the Launch of Dolphin Wii Emulator on Steam”

​(PressFire.no): A few months ago it became clear that the developers of the GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin would release this on the game store Steam during the year.

The plan was to make use of Steam’s built-in features such as cloud storage and achievements, and to more easily distribute the emulator.

Men now Nintendo has stepped in to block its launch. The company has sent its lawyers to Steam owner Valve, which has taken down the emulator’s pages on Steam.

This is also confirmed by the Dolphin developers themselves, which says the release has been postponed indefinitely.

In its claim, Nintendo writes that the emulator infringes their copyright by including code that bypasses their game copy protection.

It turns out that the Dolphin emulator itself contains keys that are needed to play Wii games.

These are keys that a number of other emulators require you to extract from your console yourself and enter into the emulator, but Dolphin has therefore for a number of years already had these keys entered into its source code. This source code is open to everyone on Github.

These keys are used to read encrypted Wii games when you launch them.

Thus, it seems unlikely that Dolphin will ever be released on Steam, and more likely that Nintendo has now realized that the software is potentially illegal in itself.