Nintendo, of course, is having none of it.
Nintendo has always been hard on any form of piracy, and anything it might consider piracy. One of the biggest news stories of 2021 was about the draconian punishment doled out on a key figure of a company creating and selling hacking tools. The man was incidentally called Bowser, too. This zero-tolerance policy has harmed fan-projects, conservation, emulation for years and years alongside, well, actual piracy. The latest target of Nintendo’s ever watchful legal team is emulation on the newly released Steam Deck. It really was inevitable that we’d end up here. The Steam Deck is, for all intents and purposes, a PC despite its handheld format. As such, you can do all the tweaky PC magic on it you’d do on any desktop or laptop, which is where emulation thrives. It’s shaped a great deal like the Nintendo Switch too, so naturally people would try and emulate games from the console. As PC gamers are wont to do, they succeeded. The Deck turned out to be a great emulation platform, and software such as Yuzu Switch made emulation downright easy. Content creators like ThePhawx have uploaded videos about testing Switch emulation on the Deck, showing off some impressive results - these varied game to game, but in some cases like Super Mario Galaxy, the Deck performed better than the Switch. Ever since news of the emulation prowess of the Deck went wide, Nintendo has been generous with DMCA takedowns. ThePhawx was among those hit, and the company is dealing out takedowns to other emulation related videos as well. Of course, once something is online, you can’t ever truly get rid of it - and the cat is out of the bag. Switch emulation isn’t going to be stopped by Nintendo’s efforts, as they can only slow the spread of interest and know-how. At the end of the day, this just goes to show that Valve has created a supremely versatile and flexible platform with the Steam Deck - and if they manage to cut down on the weight and bulk, it really does make the Switch obsolete in a sense.
