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Valve's latest Steam Deck trailer briefly plugs a Nintendo Switch emulator

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Re: Valve's latest Steam Deck trailer briefly plugs a Nintendo Switch emulator

#111
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd prefer a system, where the author has to actually and actively be trying to make money in a specific market, before the copyright can be applied in that specific case (as with trademark law, where the owner has to actively protect the trademark). Some nintendo games are currently not available anywhere (from nintendo or from original publisher), but if you copy/download that rom, you can get fined due to fictiona…

Whatever the merits of your sugggestion, verifying that a company was "actually and actively be trying to make money" would be wide open to abuse and practically speaking, impossible.

Why? Make copyright something you register and pay for and companies making no money from them would simply stop paying.

Re: Valve's latest Steam Deck trailer briefly plugs a Nintendo Switch emulator

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you play the same game on two devices from the same steam account without hiding offline?

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.

Examples:

* Dead Cells has Steam DRM: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Dead_Cells

* Hollow Knight does not (will run without Steam if you copy just the game files): https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Hollow_Knight

Re: Valve's latest Steam Deck trailer briefly plugs a Nintendo Switch emulator

#113
post #18

To the people saying "it's completely legal, what can Nintendo do" it might be worth considering that not everything is about legal / not legal. Companies and people have relationships and it's not always about if something is technically allowed, it's about how it's being understood by the other party and in this case it's pretty clear that Nintendo is not a big fan of emulators.

Valve include access to Flathub on the Deck by default, a repository that distributes Yuzu. The degree of separation is a little larger than outright distributing on Steam, though must be said, Valve already distribute Nintendo emulators on the store including Wii/Gamecube via RetroArch. Switch is more recent, but Nintendo are still selling games that released on those platforms. The only thing I can see this threate…

I mean, Deck is literally a Linux machine and getting to desktop mode is one click away, and opening a browser is just one more click, then you have access to literally anything your heart desires. Still, including something in promotional material is very different.

Re: Valve's latest Steam Deck trailer briefly plugs a Nintendo Switch emulator

#114
post #51

Oddly enough, the light that Humble Bundles have shone into gaming revenue cycles has made me question our copyright system as a whole. Stay with me. In Europe during the time of Mozart, composers were incentivized to be prolific by only getting royalties off the first public performance of their works. Now that is not fair today because of course we can losslessy reproduce such things infinitely. However, Humble Bun…

I'd prefer a system, where the author has to actually and actively be trying to make money in a specific market, before the copyright can be applied in that specific case (as with trademark law, where the owner has to actively protect the trademark). Some nintendo games are currently not available anywhere (from nintendo or from original publisher), but if you copy/download that rom, you can get fined due to fictiona…

I always think about this with the Black and White series. You can't download it anywhere. EA has it listed on their website but its basically just marketing material which is bit of a tease.

The entry on the GOG.com wishlist has 36K+ upvotes with a new comment posted every week or so. Seems like low hanging fruit for someone at EA to make a quick buck.

https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/black_white_2

Re: Valve's latest Steam Deck trailer briefly plugs a Nintendo Switch emulator

#115
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused. Please define "emulate Steam games".

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'.

They're emulating the steam service itself though, not the games. That's very different.

Re: Valve's latest Steam Deck trailer briefly plugs a Nintendo Switch emulator

#116
post #3

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.

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?

Re: Valve's latest Steam Deck trailer briefly plugs a Nintendo Switch emulator

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve include access to Flathub on the Deck by default, a repository that distributes Yuzu. The degree of separation is a little larger than outright distributing on Steam, though must be said, Valve already distribute Nintendo emulators on the store including Wii/Gamecube via RetroArch. Switch is more recent, but Nintendo are still selling games that released on those platforms. The only thing I can see this threate…

I mean, Deck is literally a Linux machine and getting to desktop mode is one click away, and opening a browser is just one more click, then you have access to literally anything your heart desires. Still, including something in promotional material is very different.

It's not like a web browser where it's up to the user to find the services who host the content they want. Yuzu is accessible as directly as anything on Steam is, using systems and services (Discover and Flathub) Valve made a conscious choice to implement. They aren't hosting Yuzu on their own servers, but they are providing direct access to it.

Putting Yuzu into marketing materials was definitely a bit of a faux pas, but it's also one of those occasions that highlights the absurd pageantry of pushing the narrative that emulation is taboo. It's in the video because there are those at Valve use Yuzu on Steam Deck themselves and normalizing that is a net good.

Re: Valve's latest Steam Deck trailer briefly plugs a Nintendo Switch emulator

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because Valve wouldn't want you to emulate Steam games as well (which people do, for online stuff). Valve and Nintendo are on the same side of this.

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.

Re: Valve's latest Steam Deck trailer briefly plugs a Nintendo Switch emulator

#119
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd prefer a system, where the author has to actually and actively be trying to make money in a specific market, before the copyright can be applied in that specific case (as with trademark law, where the owner has to actively protect the trademark). Some nintendo games are currently not available anywhere (from nintendo or from original publisher), but if you copy/download that rom, you can get fined due to fictiona…

Whatever the merits of your sugggestion, verifying that a company was "actually and actively be trying to make money" would be wide open to abuse and practically speaking, impossible.

Seems unlikely that it’s a particularly hard problem to solve, given that trademark law works in a similar way, where if you stop actively using the mark in the market, you can lose it.

Re: Valve's latest Steam Deck trailer briefly plugs a Nintendo Switch emulator

#120

Side note, is anyone using one of these as a daily driver computer for development? The specs look decent enough and the price is cheaper than a laptop.

This is a neat idea. Would make for a good overview video or blog post if you do end up pursuing it.

The Linux desktop seems to tweak some things in the UI to be friendlier toward users coming from Windows. Not sure if that's a valve thing or not, can't say I'm a distro guru.

It's not super performant for me on a 4k display, docked. But, it should all work with a nice usb-c monitor, keyboard and mouse, and a dock off Amazon.

Guaranteed there will be something funky in the distro that gets in your way at some point though.

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