Dolphin, the GameCube emulator, will no longer be released on Steam.
In a post on the tech's website, its development team said that it had to come to some kind of an agreement with Nintendo before Dolphin could launch on Valve's platform. Anyone who knows anything about how litigious the Japanese games giant is knows that this is very unlikely to actually occur. That followed Nintendo's lawyers writing to Valve asking that they not allow Dolphin to be released on Steam, following the PC games giant to ask the team to come to an agreement with Nintendo.
"Considering the strong legal wording at the start of the document and the citation of DMCA law, we took the letter very seriously," the Dolphin team said.
"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," it wrote.
"Unfortunately, that's that."
They continued: "In the end, Valve is the one running the Steam store front, and they have the right to allow or disallow anything they want on said store front for any reason. As for Nintendo, this incident just continues their existing stance towards emulation. We don't think that this incident should change anyone's view of either company."