While Valve shouldn't have done this, Yuzu (and emulation) is completely legal. Nintendo cant do anything unless they want to go hard against emulation itself which brings us to the same are APIs copyrightable debate.
Wait, why should Valve not have done this? I know Nintendo likes to bully smaller folks but it's not like Valve is small or that they rely on keeping good terms with Nintendo, right?
Edit: I guess I didn't realize Portal was on Switch.
It seems like Valve has re-uploaded without the emulator, but I think there's a case to be made that this sets expectations for Valve and Nintendo in an important way.
Valve is not selling a walled garden product and if you are expecting them to administer the steam deck like one you will be disappointed. If that's not for you then you should not go into business with Valve - it would be painful for both parties.
Nintendo doesn't have a relationship with anyone (content creators included), apart from their lawyers.
Despite the video being retracted the desired effect has been achieved. The flurry of news has more lay people thinking about the Steam Deck in the same class as the Switch, even if their intent is not to emulate.
Sometimes when you have a sensitive relationship, it can be helpful to support the thing that makes the other company uncomfortable without openly advertising it.
what relationship? Valve is pretty much PC only other than some ports of old source engine games. Nintendo is first party console and handheld with couple of iOS/android apps. their isn't really any relationship to be sensitive.
No one is abusing the legal system. They're using the legal system. The way to fix it is not to try to stop people using the system 'wrong', but to update the system so it's appropriate for modern tech.
While that's strictly true, morality is not the same as the legal system. Using the legal system in ways that other see as immoral does not and should not make friends.
Do they have that much of one? I think they've had one Switch title (the Portal collection) and Nintendo doesn't really have anything on Steam as far as I know.
Even then the relationship more Valve repo acces and licencing > Nvidia's First Party Studio > Nintendo. And obviously Nividia has a good relationship with Nintendo because of the Tegra X1 powering the switch so it's not a situation of Valve communicating with Nintendo as much as it's Valve letting Nvidia make ports out of their back catalog by occasionally going "I will allow it" whenever Nvidia Lightspeed Studios asks politely enough.
I would guess its much more subtle than this. Consider potentially nintendo refusing to port games that were on steam, or demanding more money/control over games that have overlap with steam.
Punishing publishers for choosing to release on a competitors platform they don't like would hurt those publishers more than Valve. Nintendo's relationship with third parties is already often strained, doing anything like you suggest would in particular cause indies, which Switch relies on to fill the gaps between Nintendo releases, to flee the platform.
I think it’s pretty obvious most people using Switch emulators are getting the games on the net for free. So it’s awkward to show that on promotional material of another handheld device.
Only because it's very hard to pay for switch ROMs. As gaben himself said, "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem".
If getting switch ROMs were as easy as buying any other game on Steam, most people would probably pay, the same way most people already pay instead of pirating PC games.
It's extremely easy to buy Switch ROMs and is just as easy as buying a game off Steam. Just buy it off Nintendo's website, the eShop or Humble Bundle or wherever.
Dumping the game so you can use it on an emulator isn't as easy but removing the DRM from a Steam title isn't necessarily easy either (especially if it's a new release).
That's not buying a ROM. That's like saying when you "buy" a movie in Prime Video you are buying an mp4.
Buying a ROM would mean buying a ROM. As in, you get the .ROM.
Steam DRM by the way is trivial to bypass. From Steamworks documentation:
> The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy (i.e. copying all game files to another computer) and has some obfuscation, but it is easily removed by a motivated attacker.
Of course some games have third party DRM, and in the store it will tell you that before you buy it.
But the problem is not the DRM here. Your average gamer wouldn't care about a non invasive as long as they could get the same or better experience than they can now using a pirated ROM.
What system uses .ROM files? Nothing. Buying a Switch game is literally just as easy as buying a Steam game. In either case I still have to bypass some DRM to use it somewhere else. It's not a service problem because fundamentally they are the same.
While emulation CAN give a better experience it can also give a worse experience. Not every Switch title is playable, many have glitches etc.
> Only because it's very hard to pay for switch ROMs. As gaben himself said, "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem".
how many rootkit-level DRMs does Steam need to distribute before we can throw that comment of Gabe's out the window? They own the PC market, they have just about mastered software distribution, and everyone seems fairly happy with the service provided, yet piracy still exists and most everyone on the Steam marketplace go out of their way to implement various methods of software DRM to prevent it.
What kind of fantasy service provided is he imagining that would put a stop to software piracy?
Safe to say that the comment was plain wrong at this point, no?
Gaben's comment is related to how you can curb the effects of piracy by making games accessible and easy to install, which Steam undoubtedly does. There will obviously be people still not willing to pay who pirate games, but these were never a marketable population anyway. By improving your services you reduce the relative appeal of Pirate sources for the actual target population of these games, i.e. people willing to pay.
Piracy often wins in cases when it provides a vastly superior experience than official channels themselves. A LOT of today's AAA titles end up giving a massively better experience in Pirate releases than in official ones - Assassin's Creed and Far Cry series, Bethesda's Doom and Wolfenstein series, the Mass Effect series, Rockstar's GTA series,... the list goes on and on - plainly because the official releases are so insufferably bloated and ridden with consumer-hostile designs. Piracy is indeed a service problem. Ensure your services are good and people won't turn to Pirate releases anymore.
I have a Steam library like many people (with 500+ games I will never play) and have not pirated a game since installing Steam.
It is easy, affordable, and acceptable to me. I think the user experience can improve a lot. At this moment however, it is my preferred method of buying games.
The service problem is the problem for me. A Prime example being that I "pirate" movies available to me as a Amazon subscriber because of the VPN policy.
Tbh Nintendo does make it particularly hard to pay and emulate. To legally emulate switch games you have to buy and then dump them, but if you hack your switch to dump them, you get banned from the estore so you can no longer buy them.
Personally I'd be happy to pay money and get access to the game ROMs to run on an emulator because I find it more convenient to play them in an emulator than to switch a bunch of cables to put the switch on my monitor.
>but if you hack your switch to dump them, you get banned from the estore so you can no longer buy them.
You actually don't, and I have to give credit to nintendo for this one, there are only a few ways you can get banned (the main one being installing pirated games, the switch has telemetry that sends back data about the signatures of the games you have installed) but just running simple homebrew isn't one of them, you can load up custom firmware and run a game dumper without getting banned just fine. You can even play online with it active (I have done it).
The bigger problem is that only very old models of the console can be hacked without having to solder a modchip so this is completely inaccessible to most switch owners.
>I think it’s pretty obvious most people using Switch emulators are getting the games on the net for free.
Have people already forgotten what Gabe himself said all those years ago? Piracy is a service problem, Nintendo does not provide any way to obtain these games legally for emulation (and often does not provide any way at all of accessing their games from previous platforms), so of course people pirate them. I thankfully still have a fully working launch year Switch so I can do whatever I want but it's not particularly convenient and most people don't have this privilege at all.
The more emulation becomes mainstream the more money Nintendo will invest to illegalize it. You cannot legally get roms of commercial games, even if you own the game. Breaking of DRM is automatically copyright infringement according to the DMCA.
I will admit that I am mildly concerned with this myself. I dislike that everywhere now there are youtube videos showing off how you can make play Switch games, but on Deck. We are effectively forcing Nintendo's hands. While it was a niche thing, they mostly didn't have to care and now they might have to..
Things MAY work out to the benefit of regular users ( though often they work out to the benefit of those with best lawyers ). All I am saying is, if push comes to shove, as much as I would like to believe Gabe will actually fight this should Nintendo go after them somehow ( and I will actually spend money on Steam to fund it if needed ), it would have been so much better if it stayed a hobbyist thing.
Edit: And for the record. I love my Deck. I love that in the sea of closed off crap, Steam made it all this magic come together.
Emulation hasn't been a niche thing since the 90s, emulating older systems has always been wildly popular.
Emulating the Switch specifically is maybe a niche thing because the emulators are relatively new, the system is still sold and you can easily buy the games.
Yes, but in the 90s there were no esports, gaming wasn't a billion dollar industry ( with advertising[1] to support that ).
<<Emulation hasn't been a niche thing since the 90s, emulating older systems has always been wildly popular.
Compared to today it was popular amongst some enthusiasts, who already self-selected from perceived social outcasts. Gaming has only recently become more mainstream, socially acceptable AND ridiculously profitable.
The target is that much bigger. I stand by my 'it used to be a niche', because even being interested in computers was not a mainstream interest.
This attitude of "fearing Nintendo" strikes me as incredibly weird. Force 'em, who cares? That's competition. Love the Wii, but also it's obviously that they've had to make some terrible deals with the devil for the Switch.
And this is because Steam's model is broadly superior, for the simple fact that respects both creators and users autonomy more.
Nintendo can catch up to the times or Nintendo can get it's lunch eaten. But that's on them.
This is where I think the disconnect lies. You think it is about competition and business model. You think the best product wins. You think that just because Steam's product is better, it automatically follows that they would not be subject to whims and vagaries of the court systems ( yes, systems ). Creators and users are not meaningless, but serve as mere pawns to be traded between warring corporate entities. As users, best we can hope for is that current retarded copyrights are not enforced harder than they are already.
Nintendo's financial status is public knowledge as they are a public company. Steam's profit and warchest is unknown, but estimated below Nintendo. In short, if both sides dig in, it could be a while.
I am fine with Nintendo going down as a result of that potential fight, but are you ok with it being a pyrrhic victory, where US legal copyright landscape changes further to the user's detriment?
No no, your first bit doesn't capture at all what I was thinking, but your last bit does. And generally, across the board, I definitely do want this kind of fight because I believe that a good "public" fight is exactly what's needed, and I think this could be it, because it ropes in the massive community that is game creators.
Definitely a maybe. But I suppose I see game creators putting up a better fight than, e.g. the Tumblr adult material community, who more or less rolled over, no pun intended.
This is a very hazy area, made more hazy by the main method of getting games off of a Switch being a dev mode implemented by the hardware designers at Nintendo/Nvidia that is enabled by bridging two pins on the JoyCon connector which completely bypasses the DRM. Is using hardware features as designed "breaking" DRM? Hard to make that argument when they left the door wide open, unlocked and trivial to use.
The DMCA's language is something like "circumventing an effective technological restriction," but I don't think "effective" really gets much juice. Like, despite the total brokenness of DVD CSS by now, it's still going to be "effective." On the other hand "circumvention" sweeps up conduct that just bypasses DRM rather than actually breaking it.
Edit: for accuracy, it's "circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access" to a copyrighted work.
There's also an exploit in the USB stack of the boot ROM involved, so it's not quite "using it as intended". I'd argue ntrboot on 3DS is much closer to what you're suggesting, using a built-in repair access mechanism dependent on long(er) broken crypto.
If there is a way to make a backup of a game you own while still preserving whatever DRM exists, it would be legal. Like if you had some device that could dump the contents of the Switch cartridge without cracking any DRM, then your backups would be legal. The hard part is that "cracking DRM" could mean anything since it could be construed that any sort of electronic signals between your backup device and the cart that emulates a retail Switch is bypassing DRM. Ripping a CD or making a completely intact copy of retail software are probably the only legitimate backups you can make without technically breaking the law. Really the only "legal" thing you could do with Yuzu is to play homebrew. It would be like owning a really fancy bong in a country where weed is illegal, surely you could put legal tobacco in it but it really works a lot better with weed.
It is a big gamble. I mean, if any company can pull it off now, it is Steam. It has money, position and fairly vocal customer base, but are you sure this would be enough to stave off a relentless swarm of lobbyists descending upon WH?
Pirating games. Valve doesn't care if you play games you buy not on their hardware (being their original business), while Nintendo doesn't want you playing Switch games on a computer even if you bought the game.
Steam doesn't enforce DRM. You can usually go to the game files and just click the launcher from the file manager and the game will run without steam getting involved. Sure its not the most officially supported, but they hardly prevent you from doing it.
I think this is incorrect. I believe most Steam releases do require the Steam runtime to be present. Trying to open the game directly will "work", but that's because it's invoking the Steam runtime - just without showing the launcher.
So it claims, but many games let you click X on that dialog and play other games. I have an old laptop which is basically a dedicated Civ 6 machine. I can still play any other steam game on my desktop while the laptop has Civ open.
This is a weird claim given all of the free work Steam has upstreamed to WINE, and released with Proton, that allow you to play your Steam games on any Linux system you want.
There are replacements for steamapi.dll that let you play games without needing to have Steam open (e.g. "Goldberg"). These are sometimes called 'Steam Emulators'.
Yes we all know the joke, but it very much is an emulator. Otherwise Yuzu is not an emulator either since it mostly just translates the Switch graphics API calls to equivalent DirectX ones
If saying it like that, proton is technically windows environment emulator in Linux. So if Yuzu and co is prohibited, won't proton and wine will be prohibited as well?
For instance, I run qemu all the time to emulate various android devices.
I suspect that you're thinking specifically of game emulation though.
Running software on an emulated device is fine legally as long as it doesn't violate copyright law.
For instance, you can legally backup software that you own in the US [1] - that extends to games as well - and because emulators themselves are legal (although you may also need to backup the device's BIOS), you can have a completely legitimate archive of copyrighted games to run via an emulator.
That said, it's unlikely that most people archive software themselves, and it is not legal to distribute backups in the US, even if both parties have legitimately acquired copies of the source material.
Why does that matter? It's like torrents and Linux distributions, perfectly legal, it's not the software developers intent that makes the file sharing be legal or not, it's the users usage of such software.
1. Then you don't have to carry a steam deck and a switch.
2. This way you can buy physical copies of games, keeping full control and the ability to resell them, while also carrying your current game library on an SD card.
Edit: I forgot modding! That's a huge use of emulation.
So you don't have to travel with both your Switch and your Steamdeck. So you can play games at higher resolution and fps than the Switch. So people can make playthough and tips/tricks videos of Switch games without needing to buy a capture card. So you can use game mods without jailbreaking your switch.
Edit: I guess I didn't realize Portal was on Switch.