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Comment by mijoharas | Hacker News Reader

Possibly 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.

Valve 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.

But Valve does publish on Nintendo's eShop.

They do?

They do have one game there: https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/portal-companion-col...

Huh, missed the news in that one coming out. Thanks.

How would their partners feel about how they treat others intellectual property?

No IP is being infringed in this topic

Whether 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.

Never say never. Look at Sega.

Even Sony and Microsoft are now publishing their recent Greatest Hits on Steam!

isnt 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.

Well 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.

I 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.

I 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

Sega do not produce games to drive console sales. Nintendo's games rarely, if ever, hit other platforms.

They were very much in the console business for a long time.

Which speaks to his point, once upon a time Sega would hog their IPs for their console and arcade games.

They changed their strat abt a decade ago.

They changed after they exited the console market.

If Nintendo ever exit the console market then we can have that conversation about Nintendo IP on Stream. But if that happens, and it is a massive IF, that’s not going to happen for a long time.

They were dipping toes in the water even before their console market exit. Specifically, Comix Zone in 1995 [0], as well as Sonic CD and Virtua Fighter PC in 1996[1]

[0] - There were other Sega games published in 1995, but the examples I mention are titles specifically developed in house by Sega rather than titles by a 3rd party that they published.

[1] - Politely ignoring that whole NV1 debacle here, since it was in the end a very niche card.

If it happens, Nintendo has a long memory. Better to get on their good side now.

Apart 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.

None at all? Then how did portal end up on my switch?

For starters. He prolly never heard of portal lol

Would you elaborate on "no working relationship?"

Strong opinions here

I 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.

Why back catalogue? Modern switch games on PC would appeal to a significant audience.

True, 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)

Nintendo 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.

No, 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.

So 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...

Google is a monopolist on Android. What Nintendo is going to do about? Create their own store?

Samsung 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?

Ask Epic how it went for them.

Amazon has an app store too

It'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.

Does it even matter? In the US emulators do not violate any laws.

The thing here is that Dolphin might be breaking the law by having the Wii decryption key in its source code, the link talks about it.

Easy to avoid. Ask the user to put it's own decyrption key coming from their own console.

It's a ridiculous position if one can't just ask the court "is this infringing" without needing an inter partes legal proceeding.

Maybe neither side here wants an answer, but having an answer would seem to make things better.

How is it possible to copyright/trademark a key? Is there precedence for things like activation keys or breaking someone's crypto being illegal?

Seems like a failure to secure your software is not something you could reasonably pursue in court.

There's DMCA precedent [0][1][2] however the Streisand effect has historically overwhelmed takedown attempts.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_homebrew

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS

Valve didn’t receive a cease and desist. (edit: Well, they did, but from this post's author, Valve initiated the conversation, not Nintendo)

> In this case, none of this process was followed. To the best of my understanding, this is what happened:

> 1. Valve legal contacted Nintendo of America to ask "hey, what do you think about Dolphin?"

> 2. Nintendo replied to Valve "we think it's bad and also that it violates the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions" (note: nothing about violating copyright itself). Also "please take it down".

> 3. Valve legal takes it down and forwards NoA's reply to the Dolphin Foundation contact address.

edit: I think their note isn't exactly accurate either. As far as I know, the anti-circumvention provisions are a part of DMCA and copyright as a whole. Though, this does not sound like it was a proactive decision by Nintendo, so I am doubtful they have plans to sue the organization behind Dolphin's emulator.

edit 2: Though, the response back to Valve, however it may have occurred, was the following

> Because the Dolphin emulator violates Nintendo’s intellectual property rights, including but not limited to its rights under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)’s Anti-Circumvention and AntiTrafficking provisions, 17 U.S.C. § 1201, we provide this notice to you of your obligation to remove the offering of the Dolphin emulator from the Steam store

I 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

Or 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.

Alternatively 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.

I 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.

Is the Wii stillconsidered to be in the market?

Explain why? Do you think it's ethical to have sold games that can't be played anymore?

Here'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.

But Valve and Steam are PC, people can just install Dolphin without Steam

A lot of evil deeds make perfect financial sense.

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