"It seems odd that Valve would preemptively go and ask Nintendo for their input." Ah, this is one of those cases where you must apply a decoder ring. Valve lit

"It seems odd that Valve would preemptively go and ask Nintendo for their input." Ah, this is one of those cases where you must apply a decoder ring. Valve literally sends to Nintendo "Hey, for no reason whatsoever we're just happening to ask if you've heard that Dolphin is coming out on Steam?" and Nintendo says "Here's why they shouldn't be allowed to do this with some legal reasoning". But what actually happened was Valve said "Hey, Nintendo, are you going to sue us for any reason if we do this?" and Nintendo said "Yes". Everyone at Valve and Nintendo are fully aware of the underlying conversation. One of the most amusing things to me about human politics, and I mean of all kinds not just national-scale governmental politics, are those cases where everyone involved understands that what is being said actually means something else entirely, and despite the fact that everyone involved from top to bottom knows what is actually being said, they still act as if there is some public or set of uninformed individuals who need that fig leaf covering over the real conversation. This is one of the simpler and more obvious cases, which makes it good practice for realizing when it's happening in other contexts. It is a super common characteristic of human politics, this constant playing to an audience that may not even exist, and everyone may know does not exist, yet we must still play to them. And it happens because it works. We'd all be much more up in arms than we are if Valve had indeed nakedly asked Nintendo if they would be sued and Nintendo simply said yes. That's exactly what happened, and yet, the fig leaf works. (And bear in mind I said more upset. You may be upset now, and it may be justified. But we'd be even more up in arms if the actual conversation had happened rather than the fig leaf conversation.)