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.)
It's like Toyota with electric cars, they could have become a leader in EVs as they had the bulk of the hybrid market (and thus experience), but they kept insisting that hydrogen was the way to go despite actual hydrogen car sales being abysmal and EV (read: Tesla) sales exploding.
It's not even a Japanese issue. Every company has this issue, but Nintendo is the oldest game developer. So they get the most flack
Indeed a much more natural way would have been to ask Dolphin for a statement of their lawyers why they think it's legal run it then by your lawyers and maybe bill Dolphin for that, too.
Afterward you would have done more then needed wrt. oversight of your platform and can let them fight it out in curt.
It makes me believe that either of:
- Nintendo pressured Valve (or just payed well) into a NDA agreement to give them a heads up for emulator cases (seems reasonable to assume)
- Valve has some undisclosed ongoing cooperation with Nintendo wrt. some future products (unlikely, but there is a surprising overlap and I haven been joking around that both should just Team up for their next handheld hardware and just sell it as a locked-down proprietary OS Nintendo version and a unlocked linux OS Valve version ..., nah probably not)
- Valve is somehow dependent on Nintendo, e.g. patents related to handheld gaming consoles or similar
- the decisions wasn't fully thought thru (also quite likely)
Sure there are some subteties to a centralized server vs. a distributed ledger, but the core goal is the same: companies want to be a platform owner, allow for generation of some speculative assets for users to trade, and take their cut as a middleman. To my knowledge, it's the middle factor that many have issue with.