Will Nintendo ever go after Dolphin?

[JohnTravolski]

So I know we've been okay so far, but I'm just curious; do you think that there's any legitimate chance that Nintendo will try to go after Dolphin and completely stop its development at some point down the line? I'm honestly not really familiar with the legal issues at stake here, but it's just something that's been going through my head for a while now.

So what do you think? Will Nintendo ever go after Dolphin Emulator?

[ExtremeDude2]

You can find some other threads that have been made previously on the forums here
Also this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_console_emulator#Legal_issues

[Helios]

They don't care about an emulator for a dead console not making any money off of their IP or trying to turn their IP into something else.

Also emulators are legal anyways so no

[AnyOldName3]

Things being legal and not threatening a revenue stream don't always stop companies trying to sue or otherwise throw their weight around. The other completely legal and not revenue stream eating open source project whose forums I go to, OpenMW, has had trouble with Bethesda. A guy working on getting it working under Android got so much flak from Bethesda for the completely legal things he was doing that he gave up on it (although there were other technical hurdles which contributed). Eventually, OpenMW and Bethesda came to an agreement where no one affiliated with the OpenMW project is allowed to promote OpenMW running Morrowind on Android, which goes so far that the OpenMW forums can't host screenshots of bugs occurring on Android unless they can be replicated in another OpenMW-compatible game such as the OpenMW Example Suite. If it turned out that someone who liked OpenMW was or could afford a really good lawyer then they could just tell Bethesda that they're going to do what they want and ignore them, but if someone just decided to do that without a really good lawyer on standby they could end up responsible for unaffordable legal fees and associated expenses which might bankrupt them before they managed to convince a court that what they did was legal.

In the case of Dolphin, there's already some legal precedent in the US and reasonably clear EU law stating that emulators are fine, but Nintendo already falsely claims that emulators are illegal on their website and could potentially confuse a jury of laypeople for long enough that it could cause someone a lot of stress. If they did decide to throw their toys out of the pram and cause problems for some of Dolphin's key developers, though, it wouldn't kill Dolphin. As it's already very mature and well known, being stuck with existing builds isn't the end of the world and an open source project this big has had so many people coming and going over the years that there'd always be someone able and willing to at least perform basic maintenance. The most damage Nintendo could do were they to abuse the legal system would be mostly restricted to a few people and wouldn't stop anyone actually using Dolphin, but might hurt their reputation and even attract new users to the emulator because there'd inevitably be media attention. It would be very hard to justify for any reason other than sadism, and that tends not to be enough to motivate businesses to separate from their cash.

[Helios]

tldr no

[DarkMoe]

I read somewhere that the latest games, Let's Sing 2018, and their regional releases sold more than 1 million games just for the Wii alone. Wii not dead =D

[mstreurman]

(01-22-2018, 02:32 AM)DarkMoe Wrote: I read somewhere that the latest games, Let's Sing 2018, and their regional releases sold more than 1 million games just for the Wii alone. Wii not dead =D

Those games are the only ones that still get released for an otherwise old and unsupported machine and that is mainly because they know that it was one of the best selling consoles of all time and everyone and his/her GREATGRANDmother has one... Let's Sing and Just Dance are perfect for "casual" players and guess who are those casuals. There is also a reason why they skipped the Wii U: "Nobody" (I do though) has it and if they want it, it's backwards compatible anyway and they did release it for the Switch because not doing that would be quite stupid.