A recent Steam Deck video briefly showed an icon for Switch emulator Yuzu, indicating that even Valve employees are emulating Switch games on the handheld PC.
In the same video announcing the official dock and the fact that Steam Decks are now available without a reservation, eagle-eyed viewers noticed that Yuzu appeared in a list of recently played games on that particular Deck. Today, however, that video has been taken down and replaced. Of course, the internet was sure to capture screenshots before it disappeared.
Valve’s new official video for the Steam Deck has a very interesting game icon in ithttps://t.co/KvI6b2nVa1 pic.twitter.com/uPsw3hOpogOctober 7, 2022
The new version of the video simply shows the Portal 2 icon where Yuzu once was. You can see it below at the 1:40 mark.
It’s unclear what prompted the video’s replacement, though the most likely explanation is that Valve realized that the emulator appeared here and pulled it down for a correction. Nintendo still seems to be willing to take some sort of action against demonstrations of how to use Switch emulators on Steam Deck, as we saw earlier this year, though this trailer didn’t show any Nintendo branding or games.
Either way, you shouldn’t necessarily take the appearance of Yuzu here as an approval of the emulator by Valve – after all, it’s not even officially available on Steam, and it appeared as just one item in a list ranging from Hades to The Diofield Chronicle. But Valve has long championed the PC-like openness of the Steam Deck, and emulators are undeniably a big part of PC gaming.
There are several emulators available on Steam directly, mostly as DLC for the RetroArch front end, though none target platforms as current as the Switch. Emulators themselves have been distributed without legal issues for years – the lawsuit over a PS1 emulator called Bleem! (opens in new tab) back in the day seems to have set a precedent – though many emulator users obviously pair that software with pirated games.
Valve has already been talking about plans for the Steam Deck 2.