It would be amazing if Valve stepped up with legal funds/protection there. They do get money from people buying SteamDecks for emulation and well... free publicity if they take on Nintendo.
That flies in the face of what Valve did TO Dolphin. It was Valve that proactively reached out to Nintendo before putting Dolphin in Steam. Of course Nintendo responded "please don't", so Dolphin got blocked.
Very important (imo) nitpick, Valve didn't block Dolphin, they took it off their store. Blocked sounds like they made it so to dang run it, but you can install whatever you want on a steam deck and valve isn't going to stop you.
This case isn't just about emulation; the Dolphin devs hard-coded the firmware into the emulator, which is why Nintendo had any standing. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5bfpS-WYUA
Valve doesn't really benefit that much financially from emulation though. Steam deck profit margins are probably razor thin given the cost of the competition (many of whom are in China on top of it all).
Wine/Proton is not an emulator, it doesn't emulate a console nor architecture. Yuzu does emulate both an architecture (ARM on x86) and the console. It then requires dumped games and and system firmware to run, which are not freely distributable.
Wine/Proton is a community implementation of the Windows APIs for Linux, it uses no Microsoft code nor needs any. It runs binaries that Valve already has permission to distribute (the games).
yes, but their interest is in emulating software distributed by steam
other games are only as much of interest as it might be games which could end up on steam or games which show some issue with the emulation which could be used to improve proton
there is also the thing that proton or wine just barely count as emulation, they are a bit of emulation but mostly just providing compatible OS interfaces adaption
(through Yuzu might but be that much different given how "mainstream" (but old) the switch hardware is)
through given how mainstream the switch hardware is you could argue that Yuzu isn't that different to WINE as you don't need to emulate anything but just provide compatible OS interfaces like WINE.
(if running out on ARM, there is still ARM to x86 emulation but that is just generic ARM to x86 emulation which has not that much to do with Yuzo per se)
I don't think this is likely. There is a convincible future where Nintendo publishes more and more games outside of their hardware platforms, so Valve needs to keep good business relations with Nintendo.
This future seems very unlikely. Nintendo has published like 1 phone game? They are very much a fan of their garden.
It course I would love to see this. I think Nintendo makes some very good games but have no interest in having specific physical hardware do end up not playing them.
There current lineup of mobile games are Mario Kart Tour, Animal Crossing Pocket Camp, Fire Emblem Heroes, Super Mario Run, and Pikmin Bloom. These have brought in over $1B in revenue, mostly from Fire Emblem.
Additionally, Nintendo is heavily involved in The Pokémon Company, so they saw the closed doors numbers of Pokemon Go.
I don't think it's crazy to think Nintendo will have a major presence outside of its own hardware in the future. Nintendo as a company always feels about two bad console cycles away from ruin. This feels doubly true with them putting handheld and console gaming into the same basket with Switch.
I also don't think it's crazy for Nintendo to decide that they can sell more games if they sell them on other platforms. In many ways the whole concept of a console exclusive is legacy thinking when the consoles had major architectural differences and porting was a major process.
On other hand after sale of device emulation does not pay... And selling games is where they earn money. Fight for emulation is useless legal fight for them and they are not org build for litigation.
But if tons of people are partly buying a Steam Deck because it is a great way to play loads of retro games from NES to Switch in the same console they are still likely to buy some games from Steam which is sitting right there.
