Dolphin emulator gives up on Steam — but won’t remove Wii decryption key

Don’t wait around for Dolphin to help bring Nintendo GameCube and Wii games to Steam — it’s officially no longer happening. Nearly two months after postponing the release “indefinitely,” the Dolphin Emulator team now says it’s completely given up on the idea. “We are abandoning our efforts to release Dolphin on Steam,” they write.

Remember when we showed you the receipts where Valve torpedoed the launch, telling Dolphin it would have to get permission from Nintendo if it wanted a place in the store? Today’s Nintendo was never going to give that permission, and Dolphin is now coming to terms with that:

Valve ultimately runs the store and can set any condition they wish for software to appear on it. But given Nintendo’s long-held stance on emulation, we find Valve’s requirement for us to get approval from Nintendo for a Steam release to be impossible. Unfortunately, that’s that.

As I wrote in June, it’s weird that Valve helped Nintendo kick Dolphin off its storefront. Valve proactively reached out to Nintendo, and Nintendo, in turn, issued a vague legal threat. (It was not a “DMCA takedown,” as many sites originally reported.)

But there was one element of the fracas that could have turned some in the broader emulation community against the Dolphin Emulator: it was revealed that Dolphin does indeed ship with Nintendo’s Wii Common Key to circumvent the copyright protection on Wii (not GameCube) games.

Today, the Dolphin team says that — after speaking with legal counsel — it believes it’s not doing anything illegal by including that key and intends to leave it in place. “We do not believe that Dolphin is in any legal danger,” they write.

Dolphin cites many reasons why the team believes it’s not infringing, so many that I don’t think it’s all that helpful to boil them down for you here. You should probably just go read them.

But for posterity, Dolphin doesn’t believe the key itself is copyrightable; doesn’t believe the key itself is important to a legal argument of whether or not Dolphin is decrypting discs; argues that Dolphin isn’t “primarily for circumvention” in a way that would trigger 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(2)(A); and argues that Dolphin should be covered under that law’s reverse engineering exemption.