Everyone’s favorite Nintendo GameCube and Wii emulator, Dolphin, is coming to Steam for free in 2023.
On Tuesday, the development team announced that Dolphin will launch on Steam for free this year (thanks, Nintendo Life).
“When we launch on Steam, we’ll have a feature article detailing the process and features of the Steam release,” reads a statement on Dolphin’s blog. “We’re pleased to finally tell the world of our experiment. This has been the product of many months of work, and we look forward to getting it into users’ hands soon!”
There’s no firm release date yet, but according to the official Steam page – this iteration of Dolphin will launch in “Q2 2023,” which traditionally encompasses April, May, and June. So the launch can’t be far away.
Dolphin has been one of the most popular emulators for over a decade. It lets you play GameCube and Wii games on a PC at modern resolutions with better frame rates, along with neat additions like save states, user mod support, and network functionality for specific titles.
Obviously, the games won’t be available – and there’s a massive disclaimer on Dolphin’s Steam page already.
“Dolphin itself does not provide any of the games,” it reads. “It is just a tool to run legally obtained copies of these games. Once you have dumped copies of your games into a compatible format, you can launch them directly in the emulator.”
There are a lot of excellent GameCube and Wii games that haven’t made it on the Nintendo eShop, so this is a massive win for game preservation.
Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.
