It may have also been the fact that they linked to instruction on how to rip prod.keys and system firmwares. Also their instructions on enabling running copyrighted ROMs - despite the fact that Ripping game ROMs and firmware is not (unfortunately arguably, due to licencing models and jurisdiction - you will own nothing and like it.) illegal so long as it's for personal use.

They should've advertised it primarily as a testing and homebrew platform, and made sure not to make too much mention of the fact it can be used to play backups. Then they can at least play the ignorance card with more confidence.

Even then though, multi-billion yen company Nintendo probably would still pull this shit and drag, drag, drag the lawsuit out for forever and a day- draining lawyers fees of money. That being the case, settling is unfortunately the only option.

I do wonder if this is specifically what got them, would probably take a lemmy lawyer to unpack it, but I would have to imagine if they didn't have a patreon and basically a company, it would have been much harder for Nintendo to do anything about them. And I would also imagine in retrospect whatever money they got was not worth it when it ends like this.

I always assume when people operate services like this, that they host it in a country like Russia that's less likely to care about takedowns by western corpos and done anonymously as possible. Even though it's just an emulator, you would think they wouldn't be so brazen as to have a patreon which I'm sure requires someone's identity/billing info. They probably still could have been tracked down if they took crypto donations or something like that, but you would think that would be the first choice over putting a giant target on their backs. Patreon is obviously just gonna hand over whatever info they are asked to give when served a warrent, and so is Discord for that matter if they had any personal info on there too.

I think the difference with Dolphin is that it now emulates an extinct system(s), so it cannot possibly compete with the actual thing. They did have a close call last year, if I remember, and they pretty quickly went into "jettison all illegal shit out of the code base NOW." -mode.