Its not that much of a loss given you can still launch Dolphin from steam anyway. It just won’t be on the storefront.
Just add it as a non-Steam game, right?
Yup
I constantly say “we live in the future,” and this is more proof.
Steam has done this for like 20 years now
Being able to emulate a Switch on the SteamDeck by simply adding it as a non-Steam game isn’t something we’ve been able to do for 20 years… but OK.
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Oh God, you’re right. It’s late - “GameCube / Wii…”
Thanks :)
I use Steam ROM Manager to add my games to Steam and it works wonderfully.
There’s also EmuDeck that automates this process too.
Yeah, but you don’t get cloud saves or achievements
Can’t complain too much though. Dolphin is so good were spoiled.
Not just that, guides, community controller configurations…
Another thing, all the enhancements planned for dolphin on steam will still be hitting the standalone version
TLDR
Because Valve asked Nintendo if it was allowed, and Nintendo said it shouldn’t (pretty please), so Valve asked Dolphin to ask Nintendo if they could. Dolphin’s team finds of obviously impossible to accomplish.
I think it’s smart on Valve’s part. With how litigation-happy Nintendo is, I don’t think Valve really wants to go to bat for a program that isn’t even their own, and isn’t even needed on Steam anyway.
Valve is lawsuit averse. They sacked NFT games and AI generated games for similar reasons.
By the same extent, Valve is so based.
Plus it helps leave the door open for a potential partnership if Nintendo ever decides to bring some of their games to PC. I think it will happen at some point because there is both a growing frustration with having to re-buy your library with every new Nintendo system and a lot of profit to be made on PC if you approach it like Sony has.
That growing frustration ain’t doing shit to stop people from rebuying. Even if we get to the point where there’s 10 pissed off fans for every 1 buyer, it’s pretty much free money for Nintendo.
I hope I’m wrong but I think we’re several generations away from that. I think what’s more likely is game licensing getting tied to your Nintendo Home account (or whatever it’s called, I don’t have a Switch) and being accessible on new consoles…for a fee, of course.
Yeah I think PC only happens when potential PC sales eclipse those rebuys and not one second before. Might be several generations away tbh.
Haven’t all nintendo consoles been backwards compatible since the Wii though? Don’t Nintendo store games bought on the Wii work on the switch?
@Whirlybird @TheDarkKnight No? Switch isn’t backwards compatible, like at all. I own a Wii U, a Wii a 3DS, a Game Cube, an N64… to name the most recent Nintendo consoles I have. Nothing I ever bought for them can be used with a Switch.
Even digital titles? Damn, I thought that any digital titles you bought from the last few generations also worked on the switch.
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That’s disappointing.
The Wii U and the 3DS can be hacked to be incredibly backwards compatible. Wii U can run Wii and GameCube games natively, straight on the hardware, and the 3DS can do that for the old DS and GBA.
The Switch can do none of that, everything they got is ported or emulated.
I don’t understand, why are people mad that Nintendo isn’t allowing a random person to make money off its intellectual property and consoles? Why would or should they? There’s nothing for them to gain
There is no money being made here? This is foss software
With Nintendo, it’s always a double-edged sword. On one hand, they create really good games, but on the other hand, they are a shitbag company.
I don’t mind that Dolphin is not staying on steam for whatever reason - they do have an auto updater and I can use any other cloud service to synchronize my saves - but seriously, just let them be, Nintendo…
Yeah, let them be, or release your games on PC. They would make so much money it’s ridiculous. I would quite possibly rebuy all of my favorite Nintendo games if they released on PC
I don’t really see the point of adding it to Steam in the first place anyways
Free lifetime cloud storage for my savefiles and an easy way to update would have been pretty sweet…
Dolphin has a one click updater already.
Accessibility, ease of use, community for both discussion and content?
I completely agree. Emulators don’t belong on Steam.
Steam hosts software. Emulators are software. Google Play and Apple Store have emulators, why is Steam any different?
Because it’s actually a good storefront?
No reason it shouldn’t have emulators, of course, but there’s definitely differences.
There are already emulators in steam, so…
And evidently I don’t think they belong there.
Say goodbye to all the Sega Classics and Mega Man Legacy Collections then.
Rereleases that utilise an emulator released by the rights holders is absolutely not the same as a general purpose emulator and you know it.
Sure but why does that difference matter?
Easy access to piracy.
Not sure why it was coming to steam in the first place, made no sense. All it would do when you open it through steam is open the dolphin program, the games themselves weren’t being integrated into steam.
Just seemed like a bizarre decision by the devs that was always going to get blocked.
Cloud saves kinda big ngl
RetroArch is on steam right now and that has Nintendo emulators in it. So I dont see why not.
Dolphin uses literal copyrighted Nintendo code, that’s the issue.
No, it doesn’t and no, it’s not. The blog post from dolphin that I’m assuming this article is parroting articulates that perfectly.
It does actually.
Nintendo’s lawyers argued in a letter to Valve that Dolphin operates by incorporating Nintendo’s “proprietary cryptographic keys” by decrypting the ROMs of GameCube and Wii software, thereby violating the DMCA. Nintendo is referring to the Wii Common Key, a decryption key built into Wii hardware that was extracted more than a decade ago by a separate group — known as Team Twiizers — and incorporated into Dolphin’s code.
The team behind Dolphin argued in their blog post about the emulator’s Steam release that “only an incredibly tiny portion of our code is actually related to circumvention,” and that using the Wii Common Key does not apply to GameCube games.
It doesn’t. Encryption keys are not code and are not copyrightable. Distributing them is also not illegal. The word “proprietary” here is meaningless at best and dishonest at worst.
Of course actually using that key to circumvent drm may be illegal, but I’m no lawyer. Send like that would be on Dolphin’s users anyway.
Food for thought: if Nintendo genuinely thought they had a good legal argument against Dolphin, why wouldn’t they just send them a cease and desist directly instead of just getting them kicked off Steam?
They very well might now - valve went to Nintendo to ask about dolphin. Nintendo might not have looked into it previously but now they have. They recently got the android switch emulator “skyline” shut down via dcma. Dolphin might be next.
There’s no chance that a company as litigious as Nintendo somehow didn’t know Dolphin existed or how it works.
They know that they have no chance of winning because Dolphin is legal.
Nowhere in there does it say it’s copyrighted. And, once again, in the blog they point out that you can’t copyright a string of numbers and letters, which is all the key is. Additionally, they point out that the key has been freely shared in other contexts for years.
Idk, man. Go read the blog. They consulted with an actual lawyer before making any claim. Unless you’d like to pit your law degree against theirs? Are you a Nintendo lawyer trolling Lemmy on the sly?
Valve thought it was a good enough case to not allow dolphin on steam. Maybe talk to their lawyers.
This is the funniest thing. It didn’t go through Valve’s lawyers. There was no DMCA takedown. They asked Nintendo if they were comfortable with Dolphin being up, Nintendo said no and claimed a bunch of legal things but never filed a legal request.
But whatever, dude. I’m done summarizing the blog for you. Obviously you want to act like you know what’s going on without doing research and I’m tired of doing it for you.
Keys aren’t code.
So let’s supose for a moment they do distribute the code, so what? It’s really the end of the world?
Nintendo doesn’t sell GameCube or Wii games anymore, if you wan’t to play them good luck finding the products at good price (also, again, doing it in a second market where Nintendo doesn’t earn anything, just the speculators).
We always say that piracy solves a problem, and in this case is to mantain an replay those games that were forgotten. At least Xbox is retro compatible and Sony, although not having all games, has a variety with Plus.
Its true that Nintendo has something similar to Sony, but only with the classic games and only a few, it doesn’t have Wii or Gamecube.
Sorry for the long text, but I really hate Nintendo for doing this kind of things. Just a shame they do such great games so people forgive them.
I agree, I think it’s bullshit. The second a console is discontinued and games are no longer sold new I think emulation should be 100% legal.
It’s 100% legal anyway. What isn’t legal is distributing rom files of the game or BIOS files from the system.
Sorry yeah I mean all aspects of emulation, including ripping and distributing the games and system bios etc.
I think cuz integration with steam dick would be more seamless
Please don’t integrate with steam dick
I’m going to guess you mean deck. But all steam features. Like community controller configuration, guides etc.
They know what they wrote
Ouch
it’s a bit of a tangent on this story, but it’s been super disappointing that the wii/gc emulation layers they built for the mario collection hasn’t really materialized in anything else. I feel crazy for thinking we would start getting ports of gc/wii games that feel lost to time
You’d think Nintendo want’s people to play their games, but you’d be wrong. Nintendo wants people to buy their games. Whether they play it or not is irrelevant. While some producers and creatives might still have fun and the user first mindset, current Nintendo is only interested on profit. New releases will always make way more money than supporting old releases via emulation. They don’t care that people can’t legally purchase or play their old games. They think of them as marketing to leverage nostalgia for new releases. They place no value in their library of past games.
I’ve never thought about it like that, but this is so true. I’ve thought about how easy it would be for Nintendo to port for example gen 1 Pokemon to phones and charge $5 or $10 and make a boatload of cash. Easy money. But as you imply, that would devalue new releasesand reduce sales if people would rather spend time playing old games.
Replace Nintendo with Sony or Microsoft and you get the same result. No company cares about you playing their games, just buying and spending money. Hell they’d prefer if you didn’t play them and just gave them money.
Frankly I don’t think this is quite accurate when it comes to media companies. They want people playing games because people who play games are more likely to talk about them and sell them to other people.
But they would rather have people talking of their new games. for sure.
You’d think Nintendo want’s people to play their games, but you’d be wrong. Nintendo wants people to buy their games.
Ford doesn’t want you to drive their cars, they want you to buy their cars.
Apple doesn’t want you to use their computers/phones, they want you to buy their computers/phones.
My town doesn’t want me to use water, it wants me to pay for that water.I don’t think the Ford and Apple examples apply, as these companies make primarily physical products. Both of these companies really do want you to use their products for two reasons:
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Most of their marketing is literally just people seeing their products being used.
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Cars wear out with usage, as do computers, so the more you use their products, the sooner you’ll buy a new one.
Digital media is unique in that it’s not highly visible and using it more doesn’t make it degrade.
Digital media is unique in that it’s not highly visible and using it more doesn’t make it degrade.
I’m not sure what they has to do with whether the business involved in funding and creating the media wants to be paid for that work. But I’ll provide more examples if that helps.
Disney doesn’t want you to watch their movies, they want you to pay to watch their movies.
Netflix doesn’t want you to watch their shows, they want you to pay for a subscription.
Sony doesn’t want you to play their games, they want you to buy their games.
Apple doesn’t want you to listen to music, they want you to pay to listen to music.I agree with your examples, all of which have been heavily criticized for anti-consumer behavior, particularly Disney and Netflix, so I’m really not sure what point you’re trying to make. Just because Netflix does it, doesn’t make it okay for Nintendo to do it. Digital media companies have strong incentive to practice anti-consumer behavior, so public outcry is important to counterbalance that.
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Old Nintendo was only interested in profit as well, they just didn’t have the reputation to act quite as greedy.
Current Nintendo is the capitalist wet dream
Just Nintendo though.
Sony, Microsoft, Sega, Activision-Blizzard, Rockstar, etc all just care about producing quality games for people to enjoy and don’t really care about being paid for them.
They’re not lost, although they would be if Nintendo ever got their way. They have conclusively proven they’re not up to the challenge of preserving stuff, and luckily people have done so anyway - despite Nintendo’s attempts at fucking with it. The bummer is that you have no legal recourse.
So there’s two thoughts on this, yes the games are preserved thankfully. But also, they are culturally lost. If people don’t have easy access to creative works, those creative works become lost to all but the few who 1, even know they exist and 2, have the ability to aquire them
So yeah you and me, we can go grab images and emulators. I have a hacked wii and a retrotink. But that doesn’t mean the games aren’t lost to the vast vast majority
FWIW I believe Mario Galaxy was recompiled for Switch with only some parts being handled via emulation, so it likely isn’t just a broad drop-in solution for any game. Though I do wonder if they did something similar for Pikmin and Metroid Prime
Dolphin is also available as a core on RetroArch, which is on Steam (though I greatly prefer the non-Steam version)
The core is quite buggy and outdated IME. It’s also not included in the Steam release you have to manually install it.
I hear RetroArch doesn’t have the best and latest emulation cores in general, though I don’t keep up closely enough to know why.
Retroarch often forks projects to modify them to be loadable cores. Upstream Dolphin isn’t interested in maintaining this. So it has to be manually updated every time.
This video from a real lawyer explains the Dolphin Steam situation better than anyone I’ve seen: https://youtu.be/wROQUZDCIMI
Oh no I would not have expected this /s
As much as I hate Nintendo, I fucking hate them for their stance on emulation. You would think they would have the sense to preserve their heritage outside of their own platforms since they do such an absolute dog shit of a job of providing access to the library and catalogue of games. Either make your games available (as widely as they are via emulation) or move the fuck outta the way.
Edit: I meant to say “as much as I love them”, but going to leave my double hate up there because of how idiotic their decision is to crack down on emulation.
Nintendo loves emulation, they’ve been emulating their games for at least 15 years when they started doing it on the wii, it lets them sell you the same game over and over again on new platforms. They just don’t like it when anyone else does it because they don’t make any money off it.
When Nintendo embraces PC, the world will end
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I just used emudeck
What a surpirse
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(Add mandatory “go screw on a corn Nintendo” comment here)
retroarch remains.
