Valve has rejected a Sega Saturn emulator’s application to be listed on its online storefront, Steam, according to the emulator’s developer.
DevMiyax said today on his Discord server that Valve told him his Yaba Sanshiro emulator was “not a good fit for Steam,” and provided a screenshot as proof.
“Valve refused YabaSanshiro,” DevMiyax said. “An emulator is just like a CD/DVD player. We can play music with any device. We can watch movies with any device. But why should we not play games with any device?”
He pointed out in his appeal to Valve that RetroArch, a multiplatform program that hosts a variety of emulators, is on Steam. It seems to get away with it — somehow — by including its emulators via DLC and not in the basic installation.
The news comes a little more than a week after DevMiyax announced last Wednesday that Yaba Sanshiro would be coming to Steam soon, with the page showing a release date two days from then on Dec. 16.
But when Dec. 16 arrived, the page’s release date changed to “coming soon” before disappearing completely on Tuesday.
The emulator’s Windows version has been available to download from its official website but the advantage to being on Steam is availability to those using a Steam Deck, Valve’s handheld PC that’s somewhat locked down to software downloadable through Steam.
Being on Steam would have increased discoverability as well — many PC gamers have the 19-year-old digital storefront installed and are comfortable using it to search for and download software.
DevMiyax uploaded a video today showing what it would have been like to rip a real Saturn disc to a SteamDeck and play it through Yaba Sanshiro.
Yaba Sanshiro is also available for iOS and Android cell phones as well as non-Steam handheld PCs like the Aya Neo and ONEXPLAYER.2022. In fact, DevMiyax just tweeted last Monday that a game selection window with boxart is available now in the handheld PC version.
The Steam release appeared to have been the handheld version and it would have brought a new version of Yaba Sanshiro, 1.9.5. It’s unknown what improvements it would have included.
The Windows version of Yaba Sanshiro was last updated in August when version 1.9.3 was released to fix some bugs.
Yaba Sanshiro began development seven years ago as a fork of Yabause, an emulator that is no longer actively worked on, to bring it to Android devices. A PC version was released about a year later, seeing regular updates alongside the Android version.
Its name was changed to Yaba Sanshiro 2 in April 2021 after Google blacklisted the original app for including Action Replay cheats.
Danthrax is a contributor to the Shiro Media Group, writing stories for the website when Saturn news breaks. While he was a Sega Genesis kid in the ’90s, he didn’t get a Saturn until 2018. It didn’t take him long to fall in love with the console’s library as well as the fan translation and homebrew scene. He contributed heavily to the Bulk Slash and Stellar Assault SS fan localizations, and has helped as an editor on several other Saturn and Dreamcast fan projects such as Cotton 2, Rainbow Cotton and Sakura Wars Columns 2.
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