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Comment by dewey | Hacker News Reader

To the people saying "it's completely legal, what can Nintendo do" it might be worth considering that not everything is about legal / not legal. Companies and people have relationships and it's not always about if something is technically allowed, it's about how it's being understood by the other party and in this case it's pretty clear that Nintendo is not a big fan of emulators.

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Nintendo has no relationship with Valve or really PC gaming as a whole at all. They are pretty much as hostile as it gets towards any platform that isn't their own, to the point that a planned collaboration with Fortnite fell through because they were simply not willing to allow any of their characters to be visible on other platforms.

Valve isn't burning any bridges here because there were no bridges to begin with.

3 seconds in a trailer for a niche feature are not worth offending your competitor over.

Nintendo is not a direct competitor. And even if they were, what exactly does Valve have to lose here?

Portal was released on the Switch, so presumably they do have some sort of relationship.

As someone else already pointed out, this was likely done through Nvidia, they had already done an ARM port of Portal for the Shield which is basically the same hardware as the Switch so they probably just asked Valve and they said "sure, why not"

> Nintendo has no relationship with Valve

Portal and Portal 2 recently released on the Switch

Only because Lightspeed Studios ported them to their parent company's hardware (Nvidia Shield) and the Switch happens to use almost the same SoC. Valve's relationship with Nintendo here has been incidental.

Valve include access to Flathub on the Deck by default, a repository that distributes Yuzu. The degree of separation is a little larger than outright distributing on Steam, though must be said, Valve already distribute Nintendo emulators on the store including Wii/Gamecube via RetroArch. Switch is more recent, but Nintendo are still selling games that released on those platforms.

The only thing I can see this threatening is native JoyCon/Pro Controller support on Steam (more specifically use of their controller glyphs) if Nintendo want to get real vindictive. Otherwise there doesn't appear to be much of an existing relationship to be threatened.

I mean, Deck is literally a Linux machine and getting to desktop mode is one click away, and opening a browser is just one more click, then you have access to literally anything your heart desires. Still, including something in promotional material is very different.

It's not like a web browser where it's up to the user to find the services who host the content they want. Yuzu is accessible as directly as anything on Steam is, using systems and services (Discover and Flathub) Valve made a conscious choice to implement. They aren't hosting Yuzu on their own servers, but they are providing direct access to it.

Putting Yuzu into marketing materials was definitely a bit of a faux pas, but it's also one of those occasions that highlights the absurd pageantry of pushing the narrative that emulation is taboo. It's in the video because there are those at Valve use Yuzu on Steam Deck themselves and normalizing that is a net good.

Nintendo also isn't a big fan of people playing Super Smash Bros competitively. They're allowed to have their opinions but I don't see why anyone needs to respect such silly opinions.

There’s a difference between a random consumer respecting their opinions and businesses working in the same industry not trying to put them in a weird position.

Nintendo is notoriously as hostile as they come, especially to the PC gaming market. Since Valve is all-in on PC I don't see why they should be the ones to play nice.

makes sense

I've seen a lot of formerly xbox and playstation exclusive titles start popping up on Steam... so you wouldn't need an emulator for those...

No other way to get Mario on Steam yet though ;)

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