Nintendo begins taking down Steam Grid artwork for emulated games

With Steam's UI refresh a couple of years ago, Valve made it easier for users to organise their game libraries. One of the features of this UI refresh was the ability to add in new custom images for game cover art, which has been particularly useful for those adding non-Steam games to their library. Now, Nintendo has its sights set on this practice. 

SteamGridDB has been a great place to look for custom cover art for games in your Steam library. Due to Steam's ability to add shortcuts to non-Steam games to the launcher, you'll find custom art for console-exclusive games on the site too, including a number of Nintendo titles that are only playable on PC through emulation.

Nintendo has issued DMCA takedown notices for a number of submitted artworks on SteamGridDB, targeting images for Switch games, like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, Splatoon 3 and Super Mario Odyssey.

SteamGridDB does not host or link to any emulators or ROMs on its site, but the fact that people could use these images to make a nice digital library of emulated games on Steam was enough to set off alarm bells for Nintendo. The company has likely been paying closer attention to Steam recently due to the popularity of emulators on the Steam Deck.

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KitGuru Says: Ultimately, this move has only brought more attention to the fact that you can add shortcuts to emulated games on Steam and easily obtain a custom cover image to make it look nice in your library. 

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