Though the majority of people are still unable to get their hands on Valve's handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck, there's an awful lot of hubbub surrounding the device on the Internet. A major point of contention was that of its emulation capabilities, in fact, though early benchmarks show that it performs admirably well in almost all situations.

While emulation itself isn't illegal, the obvious elephant in the room is that of where players using said emulators might be procuring their games. This isn't a major concern for legacy platforms such as PSX, but the fact that Steam Deck seems to be capable of Nintendo Switch emulation, too, is raising red flags for the Japanese console manufacturer and game developer.

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The popular handheld console and PC benchmarking YouTuber, ThePhawx, recently uploaded a video detailing his testing of the Yuzu Switch emulator on Steam Deck. While performance wasn't perfect just yet, Steam Deck could run games such as Super Mario Galaxy perfectly well at a higher frame rate than Nintendo Switch could, making it obvious that the Steam Deck is an incredibly potent emulation device. Nintendo, however, promptly reacted by taking ThePhawx's video down.

A photo of someone playing a Steam Deck with an image from Red Dead Redemption 2 on the screen.

Nintendo is no stranger to using DMCA takedowns to fans of its intellectual properties. At the start of 2021, Nintendo removed hundreds of fan-made games from the Internet in a wide-sweeping DMCA campaign. The company even has a dedicated team of legal infringement specialists that seek out fan projects and showcases to "give all legally-sold Nintendo games a chance to succeed," and the Steam Deck's emulation capabilities were sure to be contested from the very start.

Though there's certainly no shortage of games to play on this handheld gaming PC, especially now that Valve confirmed its new games for Steam Deck, emulation has always been one of the main reasons why people were interested in owning a Deck. It would seem that these capabilities will, however, need to be discussed in hushed tones, lest Nintendo begins to issue even more DMCAs to users and content creators.

Considering some early Steam Deck prototypes that got shown off not long ago, Valve is sure to have had any potential Nintendo Switch similarities in mind while designing the Steam Deck. Though Nintendo seems to be fully intent on removing any and all traces of Nintendo Switch emulation on Steam Deck from the Internet, it's worth pointing out that they're not likely to succeed. With both Yuzu and Ryujinx emulators likely to run well on Valve's handheld PC, the community is sure to spread the information far and wide, even if content creators end up avoiding the discussion.

Steam Deck is now available for purchase.

MORE: The Steam Deck Gives Valve Good Reason to Revive Old Franchises

Source: ResetEra