In general, I'm not sure what the idea of putting Dolphin on Steam was supposed to gain. First, I have a hard time conceiving why I'd even want to manage it from Steam, but aside from that, it seems like it'll only attract attention from people wanting "free games".
It's sad too, since the Wii is a console that makes it extraordinarily simple to dump your own game discs and use the emulator in a completely legal fashion.
> In general, I'm not sure what the idea of putting Dolphin on Steam was supposed to gain. First, I have a hard time conceiving why I'd even want to manage it from Steam,
In case you haven't heard of it, Valve sells the Steam Deck: a handheld gaming console with Steam as its primary UI. Under the hood, it's a low-power AMD x86 system running Linux (specifically, Valve's SteamOS distro). So having Dolphin on Steam would be the optimal way to make Dolphin available to Steam Deck users, just like having Dolphin available on the Google Play Store is the optimal way to make Dolphin available to Android users even though side-loading is an option.
I would bet good money that this is exactly why a DMCA was sent; someone at Nintendo was shown a Steam Deck, which is a big Switch competitor, loading Dolphin and playing Gamecube games for free with better performance than what Nintendo themselves deign to provide us.
To most people, if it's not on Steam, it doesn't exist, especially on a Steam Deck. So while anyone can still install it outside of Steam, by not being available via Steam their possible audience is significantly reduced.
Is this so true of emulators? Emulators already often require lots of work to go find the games themselves (which certainly would not be distributed on Steam), so how much effort is actually spared for the users? Very little.
> Emulators already often require lots of work to go find the games themselves
That used to be true, but today, ROM sites are very easily discoverable on Google. People also sell ROMs on hard drives and SD cards on Amazon, many of them qualifying for Prime delivery.
I used to find them on IRC fserves. I first started doing that maybe 26 years ago. Using an IRC client and a command line, so not stuff most people off the street would be familiar with. Later on I remember them being traded on apps like Hotline. I don't recall it being super easy in the few years after that. It wasn't a mainstream thing, you had to know a little bit about the communities involved.
Dolphin is by far the most well known emulator in its category. Honestly emulators don’t really have their place on a game marketplace, that would really just be an incentive for people who want to easily pirate games for free.
Anyone interested in emulating a Wii or GameCube for legitimate reasons will easily find Dolphin and can install it on their Steam Deck.
> Anyone interested...will easily find Dolphin and can install it on their Steam Deck.
Anyone?
Really, anyone?
rubs forehead
It's easier to have it on Steam. When I was 15, 25 even, maybe I'm so excited and hellbent on getting an emulator that I actively figure out the 10 step process to sideload. As a casual, it's much nicer when it's one step.
> maybe I'm so excited and hellbent on getting an emulator that I actively figure out the 10 step process to sideload.
Steam Deck isn't locked down. From Steam itself, you just "exit to desktop", and bam you're met with a KDE desktop. Running Linux. You can do whatever you want. Including installing emulators and games that aren't distributed on Steam. It only takes one step: "flatpak install dolphin-emu"
> Honestly emulators don’t really have their place on a game marketplace, that would really just be an incentive for people who want to easily pirate games for free.
So what? If Nintendo fails to provide a way to buy the games on that device its on them. We really don't need to make excuses for corporations generating unneccesary E-waste due to their greed.
Yes but if you make an emulator available to most people, most people are going to use it for piracy, and you are obviously going to attract a lot of attention from the law. I'm not saying that emulation should be illegal, but really this is a case where I am literally not surprised at all that Nintendo would act
That really is irrelevant. Companies don't want it to be there, and will use their immense powers to try and stop it being there. It isn't worth the risk of trying to put it on Steam
It's not like having dolphin on steam will give you access to free gamecube and wii games. You will still have to get them yourself and/or any bioses that may be required, I dunno.
Which means a bit of hacking, which means you should already be capable enough to install emudeck on your steam deck. Which is vastly superior to any single emulator on steam itself.
> It's not like having dolphin on steam will give you access to free gamecube and wii games. You will still have to get them yourself and/or any bioses that may be required,...
Ps this is not a moral judgement, I would use it myself except I don't like Nintendo's style of games. I owned a Wii and bought some games but I was really bored. I modded it and downloaded everything I could get and not a single game could capture my attention. I missed good fpses, it was all party games and kiddyish/cartoonish stuff like Zelda and Mario. So I've never looked at Nintendo since. Perhaps these days their offers would be more interesting to me but I haven't checked.
This was in the early days of the Wii though, when it was still a big hype. So all the games I tried were launch titles or very soon after. I thought the motion controller thing was not very well worked out and more of a gimmick. I was expecting it to be more exact like with VR controllers these days.
When it was on its own website and hosted on its own servers, with mostly word of mouth (online) spreading it, Nintendo were probably not too happy, but accepting that it was legal.
But when Valve, who are sort of competing with Nintendo, host it and promote, that's another matter. Especially when many people do play games using it that they have not legally obtained.
No, but the average (read: casual) user isn’t comfortable using the command line to install packages from the command line (and I don’t think SteamOS comes with a package manager UI), so there’s a huge potential install base for users if they could install it via the UI.
Steam has been much more than just a store-front for a while now. There's a few features that would take the Dolphin team a lot of effort to implement independently but can be integrated without much effort through Steam. A few examples would be:
- Steam Remote Play: Seamlessly playing your Wii games from your TV.
- Steam Workshop: Authoring, distribution, and management of modifications to the emulator.
- Steam Input: A powerful abstraction layer dealing with different controllers and the mapping of their inputs. Sharing and downloading input maps from the community is directly integrated.
- Steam cloud save: Share configuration and save data between computers.
- Steam's multiplayer API could potentially have made it much easier to use Dolphin for multiplayer games.
Most of these things can be achieved without Steam but they're less convenient, more difficult for non-technical users, and yet another thing to manage, update, and keep track of.
Dolphin's Twitter account stated that cloud saves was part of the Steam release.
It really is one of the main reasons to do a Steam release. Seamlessly playing your savegames and save states on desktop PC over to Steam Deck and back again made RetroArch one of the killer Deck apps IMO.
It's sad too, since the Wii is a console that makes it extraordinarily simple to dump your own game discs and use the emulator in a completely legal fashion.