For those that do not know who I am, I am the co-owner of Retro Gaming Magazine (founded in 2012). I have written over 1,200 articles on that site and still do so nearly daily. One article that bothered me was covering the recent activity of Nintendo against fan games. It is rather depressing that Nintendo is taking blanket legal action against fan games but my question is, are they right or wrong in this matter?
Okay, the law is the law. The difference in matters like this is it is up to the company that owns the rights to do something about it. Police are not just randomly knocking on doors and arresting people for having unlicensed intellectual properties in their possession (if they were just about any gaming/comic convention would be devoid of presenters).
For years Nintendo has let fans go hog wild with their IP's in fan games, hacks and the like. Recently something changed. Nintendo has begun taking on fans with legal action for using Mario, Zelda, Metroid and others in unlicensed games. For the most part it is giving Nintendo a bad reputation and that is not a good thing when they are looking to launch the Nintendo NX console sometime soon.
What are your thoughts? Is Nintendo in the wrong here are they right all along and fan game makers, and fans in general, just need to get over it?
It's an interesting thing to see. I think Nintendo is cracking down because of Sun and Moon coming out soon. Yet the ones who play the fan games , will still most likely buy their game. I think they are just paranoid since Pokemon is even more of a hot property then it has been before. I heard something about they did the same to a Metroid fan game. I'm surprised they have not tried to shut down Pixelmon, since that is even more huge in the light then the other fan projects.
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Yep, they shut down Project AM2R. I interviewed the developers right as they received the notice. A decade of work gone. They weren't selling it, they were not asking for donations or anything. I do wonder though if Nintendo might pick up devs like them for future games. Not likely though, honestly, since Project AM2R used Game Maker and not a 100% custom coded engine, or even something like Unity. I can still hope though.
They also pulled the Nintendo Power issues off of Archive.org (also covered on my site), pulled an online multiplayer Pokemon game (again covered) and then did the blanket wave against the Gamejolt/Github fan games (again, covered on RGM). They are on quite the warpath since they also went against Youtube channels and content creators a few years ago.
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That is just terrible. They are just as strict as Paramount with Star Trek, Star Trek Axanar got the same treatment. They were doing their Fan film to just do it, and they didn't like that they brought in over 1 million in crowd funding to make it. Freaking sad. With out fans, their properties would never thrive.
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Covered that one too. It is indeed sad. These HUGE companies think they are impregnable as far as their earnings go. They are earning those profits because of the very people they are attacking with this litigation. I call it the "Metallica Method".
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