In the world of video games, it is often said that Nintendo has two faces: on the one hand, there is the cheerful and familiar Nintendo that makes video games for all audiences, including the successful The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. On the other side, there is Nintendo, the company, which does not hesitate for a second to protect its intellectual property, even threatening to sue modders or small developers who create games based on its licenses (without the company’s permission).
For this reason, when the gaming community found out that the Dolphin emulator was coming to Steam, Valve’s platform, many feared the worst. For those of you who don’t know it, Doplhin is a PC emulator for GameCube and Wii consoles that enjoys great prestige in the gaming community.
While Dolphin was scheduled to launch on Steam by the end of June at the latest, it finally failed to happen due to a copyright lawsuit filed by Nintendo. But what most of us could not expect is that it was Valve itself who helped Nintendo in this matter.
The Verge has had access to a series of emails between the two companies where it can be seen that Valve contacted Nintendo to inform it of the future launch of Dolphin on its platform. This action is not trivial, as the company would like to express its commitment to Nintendo to take action in order to avoid a future copyright lawsuit.
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In the email, a Nintendo lawyer thanks Valve “for bringing Nintendo’s attention to the announced Dolphin emulator offering on Valve’s Steam store” and requests the company to remove Dolphin’s listing on the Steam website by referring to section 1201 of the DMCA, the U.S. copyright law.
This email, therefore, makes it clear that Nintendo “threatened” to sue Valve to make the company remove any trace of Dolphin from the platform, and that the Japanese company did not contact the creators of Dolphin at any time. Because of this, Valve had to comply with the request and remove the Dolphin tab without the emulator developers being able to challenge the decision.
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