Nintendo blocked Dolphin emulator release on Steam

Yes, let's pretend that the overwhelming majority of people using emulators aren't also playing pirated software.

Let's say that is the case, is that wrong? If so why is it wrong? Pirating games that are no longer officially produced or sold on consoles that are no longer officially produced or sold, is that wrong? The only argument that makes sense for copyright law that I've seen is to protect sales, but what sales are there left to protect?

Whether or not you agree with the law as it stands is irrelevant.

Ah, so to you it is irrelevant if it is morally correct or not (or the actual purpose of the law), but whether it is legal or not. I hope you will reflect on how you gauge what is wrong if the law ever tries to outlaw something like End-to-End Encryption (they have a few times and thankfully failed)

Oh, come off it. We're not fighting some moral crusade here. We're talking about video games. Let's try and keep things in perspective.

“People who emulate games are all committing piracy.”

I can't remember somebody saying this. Could you cite it please?

Right, "game preservation", by which most people mean "free games".

"Most" and "all" is a huge difference, and you know that.

No, I don't really think it's that huge. "Most people doing X are Y" is enough that for any given person doing X, you would assume they're a Y. So as an insult or an instigation of a moral panic, it's pretty much equivalent.

Most people are female, so I assume you're female?
<spock>Highly illogical.</spock>

In addition to this, Nintendo's taken down the Wii Shop, and Wii U and 3DS eShops, which has resulted in many games from all of these systems being completely unobtainable.

And the DSi shop, too.

“People who emulate games are all committing piracy.”

I can't remember somebody saying this. Could you cite it please?

Right, "game preservation", by which most people mean "free games".

"Most" and "all" is a huge difference, and you know that.

No, I don't really think it's that huge. "Most people doing X are Y" is enough that for any given person doing X, you would assume they're a Y. So as an insult or an instigation of a moral panic, it's pretty much equivalent.

Most people are female, so I assume you're female?
<spock>Highly illogical.</spock>

I would say the usage for "most" does not include "just over 50%". You gotta be getting into the three quarters range to be "most".

“People who emulate games are all committing piracy.”

I can't remember somebody saying this. Could you cite it please?

That’s the nice thing: you don’t need to! You just have to murky the waters and blur the line between emulation, game preservation and piracy. You only need to place one group near to the other and subsequently insinuate that there is no difference between both groups at all. Sooner than not game preservationists are deemed criminal and Nintendo’s upper management opens a bottle of champagne to celebrate the successes of the hard-working minions in forums and comment sections.

I prefer people citing what has actually been said and react to that instead of making up quotes. It always makes it look like they wouldn't trust their arguments enough.

You are right. Consumers don’t need rights anyway.
Most of them even smell badly in my experience.

Yes, let's pretend that the overwhelming majority of people using emulators aren't also playing pirated software.

Let's say that is the case, is that wrong? If so why is it wrong? Pirating games that are no longer officially produced or sold on consoles that are no longer officially produced or sold, is that wrong? The only argument that makes sense for copyright law that I've seen is to protect sales, but what sales are there left to protect?

Whether or not you agree with the law as it stands is irrelevant.

Ah, so to you it is irrelevant if it is morally correct or not (or the actual purpose of the law), but whether it is legal or not. I hope you will reflect on how you gauge what is wrong if the law ever tries to outlaw something like End-to-End Encryption (they have a few times and thankfully failed)

Oh, come off it. We're not fighting some moral crusade here. We're talking about video games. Let's try and keep things in perspective.

So when it comes to enforcing copyright it's serious business and the law is absolute, but when it comes to keeping art alive and accessible it's "just video games" and so not eligible even for consideration. What a convenient double standard.

I use Dolphin myself. Having it available on steam is not critical to me. I have Dolphin installed as a flatpak on my end. So any steamdeck user can easily install it that way too.

That's just not how most people will use such a device IMHO.

Usually, I'd agree, but I think any crowd comfortable with tinkering with emulation will be absolutely fine booting into desktop mode to install a flatpak. I'm not much a tinkerer, but Liam's article on adding Decky Loader support is so easy to follow and complete that it's absolutely trivial. I doubt many emulation fans will even care that Dolphin is off Steam.

I would have figured that the main difference of having it available on Steam with no muss and no fuss would be precisely that a whole lot of people who are not "comfortable with tinkering with emulation" would be comfortable just downloading something from Steam.

Sure, but that's not the experience. You download Dolphin... now what? Now you need to rip games off your cartridges, or more likely, source them from dubious sources. My point being that if you're committed to emulation, running a flatpak on your SteamDeck is no big deal.

However, I wasn't aware that this somehow magically enabled cloud-saves, as Arale-senpai pointed out, so that's definitely a loss.

I use Dolphin myself. Having it available on steam is not critical to me. I have Dolphin installed as a flatpak on my end. So any steamdeck user can easily install it that way too.

That's just not how most people will use such a device IMHO.

Usually, I'd agree, but I think any crowd comfortable with tinkering with emulation will be absolutely fine booting into desktop mode to install a flatpak. I'm not much a tinkerer, but Liam's article on adding Decky Loader support is so easy to follow and complete that it's absolutely trivial. I doubt many emulation fans will even care that Dolphin is off Steam.

I would have figured that the main difference of having it available on Steam with no muss and no fuss would be precisely that a whole lot of people who are not "comfortable with tinkering with emulation" would be comfortable just downloading something from Steam.

Just acquiring the emulator isn't the fiddly bit, though. Sourcing roms, mapping inputs to a controller that may not match the original hardware, and configuring graphics settings are. Simply putting an emulator on Steam really doesn't make it "no muss and no fuss" to actually use.

Yes, let's pretend that the overwhelming majority of people using emulators aren't also playing pirated software.

Let's say that is the case, is that wrong? If so why is it wrong? Pirating games that are no longer officially produced or sold on consoles that are no longer officially produced or sold, is that wrong? The only argument that makes sense for copyright law that I've seen is to protect sales, but what sales are there left to protect?

Whether or not you agree with the law as it stands is irrelevant.

Ah, so to you it is irrelevant if it is morally correct or not (or the actual purpose of the law), but whether it is legal or not. I hope you will reflect on how you gauge what is wrong if the law ever tries to outlaw something like End-to-End Encryption (they have a few times and thankfully failed)

Oh, come off it. We're not fighting some moral crusade here. We're talking about video games. Let's try and keep things in perspective.

So when it comes to enforcing copyright it's serious business and the law is absolute, but when it comes to keeping art alive and accessible it's "just video games" and so not eligible even for consideration. What a convenient double standard.

What the hell are you talking about? There's no double standard here. Only thing I've said is that whether or not you agree with it, downloading pirated games is illegal. That's not debatable. And Nintendo is doing nothing immoral or unethical by taking steps to maintain commercial control of their products. Yes, that includes choosing to make some of their games inaccessible for whatever reason. You do not have a moral right to their games, so there is no justification for breaking the law to download them. It's as simple as that.

Of course the most common counterargument to this unassailable line of reasoning is, "But- but game preservation!" which, let's be honest, is nothing more than a hollow rationalisation for breaking the law. For one thing, Nintendo is already preserving the games themselves in their own company archives, so there's nothing more that needs to be done. For another, yes, they're just games as opposed to something necessary for your survival. If Nintendo HQ burned down to the ground tomorrow and took their entire archive with it, humanity, as a whole, would be no worse off. To put it another way, when you're 90, is it really going to matter to you whether or not you can still play Super Mario Bros.? As I said, it helps to keep these things in perspective.


Last edited by Mountain Man on 30 May 2023 at 11:22 am UTC

“People who emulate games are all committing piracy.”

I can't remember somebody saying this. Could you cite it please?

That’s the nice thing: you don’t need to! You just have to murky the waters and blur the line between emulation, game preservation and piracy. You only need to place one group near to the other and subsequently insinuate that there is no difference between both groups at all. Sooner than not game preservationists are deemed criminal and Nintendo’s upper management opens a bottle of champagne to celebrate the successes of the hard-working minions in forums and comment sections.

I prefer people citing what has actually been said and react to that instead of making up quotes. It always makes it look like they wouldn't trust their arguments enough.

You are right. Consumers don’t need rights anyway.
Most of them even smell badly in my experience.

Buahahaha. Oh wait, he's talking about ME!

I use Dolphin myself. Having it available on steam is not critical to me. I have Dolphin installed as a flatpak on my end. So any steamdeck user can easily install it that way too.

That's just not how most people will use such a device IMHO.

Usually, I'd agree, but I think any crowd comfortable with tinkering with emulation will be absolutely fine booting into desktop mode to install a flatpak. I'm not much a tinkerer, but Liam's article on adding Decky Loader support is so easy to follow and complete that it's absolutely trivial. I doubt many emulation fans will even care that Dolphin is off Steam.

I would have figured that the main difference of having it available on Steam with no muss and no fuss would be precisely that a whole lot of people who are not "comfortable with tinkering with emulation" would be comfortable just downloading something from Steam.

Sure, but that's not the experience. You download Dolphin... now what? Now you need to rip games off your cartridges, or more likely, source them from dubious sources. My point being that if you're committed to emulation, running a flatpak on your SteamDeck is no big deal.

However, I wasn't aware that this somehow magically enabled cloud-saves, as Arale-senpai pointed out, so that's definitely a loss.

Hmmm, yes. Now if Nintendo were smart, they'd use this opportunity to put up their games on Steam. As has been pointed out on GoL in other contexts, pirating games tends to disappear when the non-pirating user experience is superior. Whether or not it's currently true that most users of emulators pirate the games to emulate (I have no idea myself, having basically zero connection to the emulation scene), a fresh new batch of Dolphin users on Steam with instant access to the games to use with Dolphin, on Steam, would probably just buy them rather than try to figure out how to run around to janky websites and fiddle around.

I think in all this discussion of downloading pirated games, thinking of keeping things in perspective we should remember that this current situation has nothing directly to do with pirating games, or even with copyright.
What Nintendo is objecting to is that Dolphin is allegedly violating a provision of the DMCA that has to do with, well as CatKiller put it back in page 2 of this discussion:

The particular quirk of the DMCA is that it prohibits "circumventing a technical measure" to bypass DRM even if the use isn't copyright infringement (and no matter how trivial the "technical measure" is); the Library of Congress has to regularly issue short-term (two or three years, IIRC) exemptions for particular applications.

So yeah, doing that is (probably, mostly) illegal in the US (but not most other places) under the DMCA (which is a stupid law), but it isn't that anyone is alleging Dolphin is infringing anyone's copyright, let alone pirating anything.

In the interest of law, I'd like to draw everyone's attention back to the '80s, where Universal (and Disney, in the background) tried to outlaw Betamax (and by extension VHS) by suing Sony in court for contributory copyright infringement. The idea was that "most" people were using Betamax to infringe on copyright. In the end, the court ruled in favor of Sony because Betamax and VHS have substantial non-infringing use-cases.


Last edited by pleasereadthemanual on 30 May 2023 at 1:56 am UTC

So when it comes to enforcing copyright it's serious business and the law is absolute, but when it comes to keeping art alive and accessible it's "just video games" and so not eligible even for consideration. What a convenient double standard.

It's art to signify the importance of preservation. But when we're talking about expressing the art (this includes the platform it's released on), it's suddenly just a product & anything goes. How convenient.

No, but as a consumer, we have the right to keep a copy of a game we've purchased, and that's what we're fighting for.

You can make a copy if you can make a copy. That doesn't mean I'm allowed to download a cracked game from my Steam games.

Emulation =/= Piracy
Stop trying to equate it.
I've even given the most common reason for emulation: convenience.
Whether it be traveling or just wanting to quickly experience an old classic, emulation makes it much easier to do.

A download from a random source is always "piracy". The source is not allowed to provide the download. That's a fact.

/edit: Added quotes


Last edited by poiuz on 30 May 2023 at 8:43 am UTC

Nintendo worst company

“People who emulate games are all committing piracy.”

I can't remember somebody saying this. Could you cite it please?

That’s the nice thing: you don’t need to! You just have to murky the waters and blur the line between emulation, game preservation and piracy. You only need to place one group near to the other and subsequently insinuate that there is no difference between both groups at all. Sooner than not game preservationists are deemed criminal and Nintendo’s upper management opens a bottle of champagne to celebrate the successes of the hard-working minions in forums and comment sections.

I prefer people citing what has actually been said and react to that instead of making up quotes. It always makes it look like they wouldn't trust their arguments enough.

You are right. Consumers don’t need rights anyway.
Most of them even smell badly in my experience.

That's again something neither having been said nor meant.

As said... It always makes it look like they wouldn't trust their arguments enough.


Last edited by Eike on 30 May 2023 at 10:00 am UTC

To put it another way, when you're 90, is it really going to matter to you whether or not you can still play Super Mario Bros.? As I said, it helps to keep these things in perspective.

No, but as a consumer, we have the right to keep a copy of a game we've purchased, and that's what we're fighting for. It doesn't matter that games are simply for leisure, it's something we own, and something we'll want to play again.

And anyway, having Super Mario Bros. available for people in the future would be important for history (the main theme was added to the library of congress. Saying that game preservation doesn't matter, is like saying that Art Museums are useless because it's a bunch of dusty old paintings.

I'm not saying there's no value in preservation, but that value is often greatly exaggerated by those looking to justify illegal acquisition -- whether it's games, music, or movies, the argument is typically the same, but the fact remains, you don't have a moral right to any of it, so there is no justification.

But here is something to think about: countless works of art have been lost throughout human history, and will continue to be lost. Are we worse off as a species because of it? No, I don't think so. It's just stuff, and there are more important things in life.

But here is something to think about: countless works of art have been lost throughout human history, and will continue to be lost. Are we worse off as a species because of it? No, I don't think so. It's just stuff, and there are more important things in life.

I think it's sad that the same laws meant to protect a copyright holder's works are the same laws which prevented archival of many 20th century films where the studio went bankrupt, the copyright holders disappeared, and the orphaned films were thus damned them to the ether. Copyright lasted just long enough for nobody to be able to archive the film stock, and by the time they were in the public domain (back when we had reasonable copyright periods), the film stock had faded away.

On the subject of video games, I found this documentary from Noclip about GOG's archival of old games very interesting. There are some games where it's completely unclear who holds the copyright anymore, so even though the studios which helped create the game would love to publish it again, they can't because they don't know who owns it, really. GOG goes through weeks and months of investigation for some of these games, where everyone thinks someone else owns it, and in the end they might find out for sure...or they may not.

While we can argue about the value of art and its loss, I would say copyright is doing a bad job protecting these works and a great job lowering the value of our public domain. One way to fix this is to go back to reasonable copyright terms. Even though there is some support for this among publishers and copyright lawyers, it's doubtful this will happen.


Last edited by pleasereadthemanual on 30 May 2023 at 1:44 pm UTC

But here is something to think about: countless works of art have been lost throughout human history, and will continue to be lost. Are we worse off as a species because of it?

I mean there is definitely a reason that archaeologists and museums exist, to find, showcase, and preserve old history that were previously lost to human history before discovery.