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Former Dolphin team member addresses Steam/Valve’s takedown of Dolphin emulator
- mijoharas 3y agoPossibly an unpopular opinion, but I think this is a reasonable strategic move by Valve. They're a game distributor, Nintendo is a massive game publisher. Distributing dolphin would piss Nintendo off. As much as I'd like it as a user, it makes sense for Valve as a company.
- tadfisher 3y agoValve and Nintendo have no working relationship. There is an approximately 0% chance that Nintendo, as a game publisher, will ever publish on Steam. This is a pessimistic move by the legal department, nothing more.
- ThatPlayer 3y agoBut Valve does publish on Nintendo's eShop.
- thebigwinning 3y agoHow would their partners feel about how they treat others intellectual property?
- flangola7 3y agoNo IP is being infringed in this topic
- thebigwinning 3y agoWhether they are or not, it would be foolish to make any move that suggests they don't care about IP. That's how their partners make money on Steam.
- TylerE 3y agoNever say never. Look at Sega.
- cglong 3y agoEven Sony and Microsoft are now publishing their recent Greatest Hits on Steam!
- dustymcp 3y agoisnt that the sane option just keep the steam price higher than your own price and people would mostly prefer to buy directly to save money, then you get the exposure from steam but you can convert them to your platform.
- largepeepee 3y agoWell they are also discovering that many people would rather pay the 20-30% extra than deal with the hassle of a subpar platform. The cost to build/maintain a competent platform is also not cheap even for the big boys like EA.
- esrauch 3y agoI think there's some limit to that; Nintendo could sell the new Zelda for $250 on Steam and get some takers, but it won't make them more money just make them look greedy.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y agoI think Valve has a clause in the contract that says the price on other platforms should be as low as the price on steam at most. Otherwise everybody could just use Steam as advertising platform. Of course I have no idea how contracts for big companies work
- sk0g 3y agoSega do not produce games to drive console sales. Nintendo's games rarely, if ever, hit other platforms.
- asveikau 3y agoApart from this being false as mentioned by other replies, Nintendo is a large player in the space with a big legal department. It could be a good strategic move not to piss them off.
- wodenokoto 3y agoNone at all? Then how did portal end up on my switch?
- stuckkeys 3y agoFor starters. He prolly never heard of portal lol
- jahsome 3y agoWould you elaborate on "no working relationship?"
- kupopuffs 3y agoStrong opinions here
- mijoharas 3y agoI was wondering things along these lines. I don't see there being a 0% chance (though admittedly a low one) that they bundle some of their back catalogue with an emulator and release the titles on PC (like Sega on Android/iOS). If they think the value of those sales would exceed the value added to the switch of eg Mario kart 64 being exclusive, then it'd make sense.
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y agoWhy back catalogue? Modern switch games on PC would appeal to a significant audience.
- mijoharas 3y agoTrue, but I think there is a much better argument in favour of gating the IP to promote switch hardware sales. (Again, from the perspective of Nintendo. It'd obviously be great if they released these things on different platforms from a user perspective)
- skeeter2020 3y agoNintendo only sells hardware because of exclusive titles. I think it's also unlikely that anyone on PC will pay $90 for a new title more than 3 months after release.
- mynameisvlad 3y agoNo, but who said it had to be full price? Sony has shown that people are willing to pay $50-60 for games that are a few years old but newly released on PC. See God of War, Horizon, Spider-Man, and I think there were a few more too.
- nazgulsenpai 3y agoI guess it just goes to show that even a juggernaut like Valve cowers in fear to appease Nintendo's lawyers. I saw a few weeks ago some coverage of the first E3 where Nintendo's entire presentation was about the dangers of the internet and software piracy and it was really enlightening and hilarious. Here's a video with some commentary: https://youtu.be/uMuJWADkMYY?t=1787 https://youtu.be/uMuJWADkMYY?t=1787
- candiodari 3y agoOr it could be that Nintendo's position is an interpretation of the law as intended by Congress. You know the law doing what it was meant to do. You don't agree. Great. But, sadly, the correct forum for that is Congress, not Steam.
- tinus_hn 3y agoAlternatively they didn’t cower in fear, they just didn’t see a business case in pissing off a big potential partner just so they could host a free app and gain nothing.
- santoshalper 3y agoHere's the thing though, Valve could have just waited to see what Nintendo would do. If Nintendo had submitted a DMCA takedown request, Valve could have evaluated it then. Admittedly, whether any of us like it or not, the takedown request would probably have been valid and Valve probably would have honored it. Still, I can't think of one good reason to ask.
- croes 3y agoBut Valve and Steam are PC, people can just install Dolphin without Steam
- haunter 3y agoSo Google is okay with it? It’s available for years + Play Store has a much bigger market reach https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dolphinemu.dolphinemu&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dolphinemu...
- wiseowise 3y agoGoogle is a monopolist on Android. What Nintendo is going to do about? Create their own store?
- pmontra 3y agoSamsung does have its own store for stuff that's essentially a duplicate of what's available on Google Play. F-Droid is a store for open source apps that are often also available on Google Play. Nintendo could create its own store for its games, why not?
- wiseowise 3y agoAsk Epic how it went for them.
- rocketnasa 3y agoAmazon has an app store too
- eterevsky 3y agoIt's quite possible that nobody at Google actively looked into this. I don't know what would be the outcome if Nintendo sent Google a cease & desist regarding this.
- valianteffort 3y agoDoes it even matter? In the US emulators do not violate any laws.
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- janmarsal 3y agoA lot of evil deeds make perfect financial sense.
- jmorenoamor 3y agoI support emulation, but emulating a live system __and__ publishing it in Steam is pushing some ethical limits. I don't say breaking them, just entering a gray area. Nobody raised an eyebrow with RetroArch, which for me is the proper use for emulation. Software preservation and keeping alive out-of-market systems.
- thargor90 3y agoIs the Wii stillconsidered to be in the market?
- dingledork69 3y agoExplain why? Do you think it's ethical to have sold games that can't be played anymore?
- hkt 3y agoStreisand moment: neat, I didn't know that there was a Wii/GC emulator!
- bombcar 3y agoIt's honestly really nice, even if all you ever do is read their release notes: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/tags/progress%20report/ https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/tags/progress%20report/
- dpiers 3y agoTheir progress reports pop up on HN pretty frequently, as they're usually pretty technically dense and interesting. Here's the discussion of the most recent update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36019485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36019485
- satvikpendem 3y agoAnd for Switch, Yuzu and Ryujinx work great. I don't know why anyone with a decent enough PC would play on native Switch hardware anymore, when you can get 4k 120 FPS + in many games, including the new Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom.
- louhike 3y agoThere are still bugs for several games, you cannot play in portable mode and you cannot play online unless you use a custom network used only by emulator users with a specific build.
- satvikpendem 3y agoSure, but for most games, especially single player ones, which are usually what Nintendo exclusives are mainly, it works fine. I'm not sure why I'd want to play in portable mode at all, as opposed to docked mode. I am on an emulator after all, it shouldn't make a difference.
- 3y ago
- tjpnz 3y agoMVG has a good summary - according to him the takedown was probably due to a decryption key being found in the source code. That weakens significantly the argument that this was a clean-room effort, which is really unfortunate. https://youtube.com/watch?v=hsQtv5IvrD8&feature=share7 https://youtube.com/watch?v=hsQtv5IvrD8&feature=share7
- chii 3y agobut is it not theoretically possible to have reversed engineered a decryption key from clean room? And also, in my mind, a decryption key is not copyrightable - it's a utility number. Clean room is meant to avoid any doubt of copyright violations, so if this isn't copyrightable then it shouldn't be a problem right?
- tjpnz 3y agoCorpos have in the past attempted to claim otherwise. The safest bet for the Dolphin team would've been to ask the user for the key.
- to11mtm 3y agoThis would probably work. You could even get cute store it in the form of a silly math problem. Way back in the early days of emulation, I recall that PS1 emulators (before a workable reverse engineered BIOS was available) would be distributed, but you had to find a bios dump and provide it to the emulator to actually load a game. This helped avoid infringement but of course was a 'hurdle' in getting things running. TBF, it wasn't that bad if you knew how to search right or had a buddy in the scene that knew a good place to download one [0]. On an unrelated note, is it bad that (most of) those early emulation sites seemed less intrusive with popups/adverts than the legitimate news sites of today? [0] - There was a period where anyone brave enough to distribute a BIOS but allow their page to get indexed by a search engine, stood a good risk of getting a C&D/DMCA.
- deng 3y ago> And also, in my mind, a decryption key is not copyrightable - it's a utility number. This is not about copyright, this is about circumventing a copy protection. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number, which is also cited in the above video. Therefore, it also makes no difference from where this number actually comes from, "clean room approach" makes no difference here.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rain1 3y agowhat the actual fuck were they thinking uploading dolphin to steam??
- VanTodi 3y ago"it's easier to provide the software to steamdeck user this way instead of 'sideloading' it"
- thih9 3y agoWhat does ‘sideloading’ mean in the steamdeck context? E.g. can you run any 3rd party game out of the box or do you need to perform some jailbreak first?
- jeroenhd 3y agoYou can just boot into KDE and do whatever on the Steam Deck. Projects like EmuDeck are often used to load emulators onto the Deck, which can include Dolphin. The root partition is read only by default (which is why Steam Deck users don't often brick their systems within a week opposed to many other beginning Linux users) but you can disable that st your own peril. However, most people aren't very Linux savvy and even Linux savvy people will need to deal with the small screen. You can pick between running shell commands or running Flatpak through discover, and I honestly can't tell which one takes longer. Typing commands on the deck sucks despite Valve's best efforts but Discover + Flatpak seems awfully slow for no clear reason whenever I use it. Installing Dolphin through the controller optimized game interface would be a lot more user friendly. It would also help with Steam's native input UI, allowing the devs to set good presets for their emulators, and it saves having tk manually add a Steam shortcut and setting up the right properties to make the emulator usable from game mode.
- thih9 3y agoThanks for the detailed answer. I wonder if there will be a rise in controller-friendly alternative stores for steamdeck after this decision.
- Dalewyn 3y agoMy only takeaway from this is that Dolphin lied to paint themselves as David-the-victim against Nintendo-the-Goliath. Getting hit with a DMCA takedown and simply getting told by Valve to sod off are two astronomically different things.
- kmeisthax 3y agoNot necessarily. The differences between DMCA 512 takedowns, cease and desist letters, YouTube Content ID matches, and side-eyed glances between nominal competitors in the games space, are very subtle. It's very easy to confuse the two and people do it all the time, because the end result is exactly the same: something you made is removed from the Internet because someone else says you didn't make it.
- hitekker 3y agoYou’ve been flagged but your point is largely correct. There is a big difference between Valve in listing them, and Nintendo sending them a DMCA. The dolphin developers ignored that difference and the former Dolphin developer called them out.
- deng 3y agoFrom the thread: > Whether that's allowed by exception clauses for interoperability, whether that's allowed by some kind of fair use clause, whether Nintendo's broken DRM actually counts as an effective copyright protection measure, etc. -> only a lawsuit could decide that. Your guess is probably as good or as bad as anyone else's. Sorry no, this is not a "could go either way" situation. There is ample precedence (see: DeCSS) on what counts as "copy protection", and there really is no question that a judge would see the Wii encryption as a copy protection mechanism and hence the DMCA would apply here. The intent that this is meant as a copy protection is what matters, not whether it is broken or not. (Just the messenger - don't shoot me.)
- pwdisswordfishc 3y ago[flagged]
- akiselev 3y agoI don't think the Federalist Society has an opinion on this case.
- nickpeterson 3y agoI think this is spot on. I do wish, however, that game companies could agree on some timeline for when emulating an old console is 'ok'. Because for the overwhelming majority of old games, its either emulate them or don't play them at all.
- cloverich 3y agoThis is where copyright is broken. Because they are perfectly happy with nobody being able to play them, and the only option being "buy new stuff". If copyright expired in a more reasonable timeframe or had more reasonable constraints (like you can't copyright something to prevent its use all together) we'd be better off, i think. yet it seems more likely ai generated content will be the next step long term, i just can't imagine copyright ever getting weaker as is.
- makomk 3y agoI think the actual reason this key is in Dolphin boils down to a historical accident of how game dumping and piracy used to work immediately after the Wii's release. Originally, people dumped games using certain DVD drives that were capable of reading the non-standard Wii disc format using undocumented debug commands, burned them to DVDs, and used modchips to make the burned DVDs look like original discs. (This is long obsolete and replaced by softmods that can just rip and run games on USB drives or SD cards using software running on the Wii.) People doing this had no way to decrypt the data and no reason to since the Wii expected it to be encrypted. So in order to be compatible with game rips designed to run on the Wii, Dolphin needs a copy of the common key. That is, the reason this key is in Dolphin in the first place is - ironically - most likely because it was completely ineffective at preventing game copying.
- bitwize 3y ago"Effective" is defined in the DMCA and has nothing to do with actually being effective. It means a measure which, during the normal course of its operation (i.e., the happy path, without anyone fucking with it), prevents copying. It doesn't matter how trivial or trivially broken such a measure is, if it's there to prevent copying you are civilly and criminally liable for breaking or circumventing it.
- Phelinofist 3y agoIn what way is Dolphin different from e.g. RetroArch, that is also available via Steam?
- veidr 3y agoLiterally just that RetroArch doesn't support any Nintendo system from the last 20 years? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists whoops wrong link but fuck it, serendipity
- hn92726819 3y agoHere's the correct link showing dolphin core can be loaded into retroarch: https://docs.libretro.com/library/dolphin/ https://docs.libretro.com/library/dolphin/ Maybe retroarch itself doesn't emulate anything, but just provide a render surface/input abstraction to 'cores'?
- ihuman 3y agoThe cores are also on Steam as free DLC
- jsheard 3y agoRetroarch doesn't include any copyrighted BIOS files, or decryption keys which could make it run afoul of the DMCA. Dolphin does include keys dumped from the Wii, which are nessesery to run common dumps of retail games which are usually distributed in their original encrypted form. The legal dubiousness of bundling keys was already well established, emulators for Nintendos other recent systems (3DS/Switch) don't include the keys, and instruct the user to dump them from their own hardware to shield the project from liability (of course the keys can easily be found online, but the projects don't endorse that out of abundance of caution).
- realusername 3y ago> which are nessesery to run common dumps of retail games which are usually distributed in their original encrypted form. I think people should just share roms with the encryption pre-removed and that's would be the end of the legal reach for Nintendo here. Not sure why we still reproduce undesirable code from the console.
- tssva 3y ago> Valve could have decided to ignore Nintendo with ~ no liability. They decided to just do whatever they were asked, and that's not surprising given they initiated contact in the first place. They most certainly would have had liability in this situation. Once informed by Nintendo that they consider Dolphin a circumvention technology, it is highly likely that in any future lawsuit a court would find Valve liable for knowing distributing a circumvention technology.
- makeitdouble 3y agoThey wouldn't have any liability if Nintendo filed no DMCA claim. They would need to comply to the claim if/when filed, but could have passed the bucket to the Dolphin team for any defense while they're off Steam, and let them duke it in court if Nintendo sues.
- tssva 3y agoDMCA notices apply to copyrighted material not circumvention technologies. There is no safe harbor for distributing circumvention technologies. What Nintendo would need to proof to make Valve liable is that they knew or should have known they were distributing software meant to circumvent protection. Once Nintendo told Valve they considered Dolphin to be circumventing their protection mechanisms, proofing the above in court is pretty straight forward.
- paulcole 3y ago> Valve's ToS likely allows them to take down anything for any reason they want. This is all you need to read. If Valve doesn’t want the headache of poking the bear that is Nintendo, they just don’t poke the bear. For anybody that’s shocked and upset by this, well welcome to the world.