After all the ruckus recently about the Dolphin Emulator for Wii and GameCube coming to Steam, and then being blocked - the team has now given up with the Steam release.
Honestly, I don’t need my FOSS stuff from Steam. Steam is a great platform, but I’d rather get open software from an open platform (meaning my distro’s package manager, or flathub as a fallback). Let FOSS support FOSS. Let Steam be a way to keep the proprietary stuff contained in its own walled garden (even if the walls on said garden aren’t very high).
I kinda doubt Steam would allow for cloud saves on an emulator because they wouldn’t want potentially copyrighted data ending up in Steam cloud saves if a game saved DLC content or something to a save file. RetroArch is on Steam but I don’t think it supports cloud saves last time I tried it on my Steam Deck. In RetroArch’s situation, the non-Steam version has more core support than the Steam version so I end up using the non-Steam version (which is also provided via EmuDeck).
Edit: I’ve been corrected, looks like Steam Cloud would be a legitimately useful reason for Dolphin on Steam. I didn’t realize saves worked on RetroArch.
i can see it both ways. for technical folks, nothing beats a package manager. in terms of getting your emulator i’m front of the masses there is absolutely no question that Steam is the platform that makes that easiest.
Honestly, I don’t need my FOSS stuff from Steam. Steam is a great platform, but I’d rather get open software from an open platform (meaning my distro’s package manager, or flathub as a fallback). Let FOSS support FOSS. Let Steam be a way to keep the proprietary stuff contained in its own walled garden (even if the walls on said garden aren’t very high).
The main draw from steam integration would be cloud backups without needing to fiddle with other services between devices.
I kinda doubt Steam would allow for cloud saves on an emulator because they wouldn’t want potentially copyrighted data ending up in Steam cloud saves if a game saved DLC content or something to a save file. RetroArch is on Steam but I don’t think it supports cloud saves last time I tried it on my Steam Deck. In RetroArch’s situation, the non-Steam version has more core support than the Steam version so I end up using the non-Steam version (which is also provided via EmuDeck).
Edit: I’ve been corrected, looks like Steam Cloud would be a legitimately useful reason for Dolphin on Steam. I didn’t realize saves worked on RetroArch.
Retroarch team quite verbally says otherwise
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1118310/view/4645982290506568438
Retroarch supports cloud saves, it’s very nice to just play a game and know it will be backed up on Steam forever
They allow it for retroarch. They even keep a copy of my texture packs
i can see it both ways. for technical folks, nothing beats a package manager. in terms of getting your emulator i’m front of the masses there is absolutely no question that Steam is the platform that makes that easiest.
The OpenRgb goat as talked! Lmao