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.
  • Ulu-Mulu-no-die@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

    We all know Nintendo is a bitch and there’s nothing illegal in emulators, but Valve’s stance looks reasonable to me, it would be serious damage to Steam if they were involved in legal litigation.

  • Big P@feddit.uk
    0·
    1 year ago

    We have a very strong argument that Dolphin is not primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection. Dolphin is designed to recreate the GameCube and Wii hardware as software, and to provide the means for a user to interact with this emulated environment. Only an incredibly tiny portion of our code is actually related to circumvention.

    That doesn’t sound like a strong argument to me. I’m a supporter of emulation but I think that the amount of code involved in making it happen doesn’t stop it from being the primary purpose.

    • green_pyroxene@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 year ago

      what’s being circumvented here is the encryption of Wii games. the primary purpose of Dolphin is not to decrypt Wii games, it is to emulate them (in other words, make them interoperable with PC hardware, as pointed out later). the circumvention of encryption is a necessary part of emulation, but it’s not the primary purpose.