GRcade

I find it hard to feel much sympathy for this. Nintendo are completely in their right to do so and if you're going to try and piggyback off of someone else's property you really should see it coming. The amount of fangames that get announced and shut down mean it's an insane task to vet each one and while 99.9% are probably totally above-board and in-line with Nintendo's ideals, they can't guarantee that 0.1% where Link is going around stabbing babies for crack money isn't there.

It's easy to paint Nintendo as the big bad corporation keeping the little guy down, but they're right.

I guess the biggest thing I'm taking away from this was that there was a tool on the internet that allowed you to create your own Pokemon games and it existed for over a decade without me having any clue

Hyperion wrote:Pokémon Maker to be released next year?

Here's hoping this is the outcome

I guess the question for me is, is there any evidence that the existence of fan games / mods / creation kits actively harms the "integrity of the brand"? In the manga industry, self-published fan-works (doujinshi) are universally ignored as long as they are not sold (or only sold in a limited run at a particular convention). That's because it's recognised that (a) those works only create publicity for the franchise and (b) almost everyone in the industry started out in a fan-project "circle". One of the only corporations to have broken that kind of unspoken social contract and pursued legal action against a fan-manga creator is - you guessed it! - Nintendo. Nintendo are worse at letting these things slide than almost every other nerd-entertainment company. Many, many other companies seem to have a much bigger "blind spot" without it being a big deal either legally or in terms of their brand strength.

Don't Nintendo have to shut down things for copyright purposes? Pretty sure it was a talking point on Easy Allies (when they shut down the Meteoid 2 fan game) and they had a lawyer explain the reason why things like this have to be done by companies. Still massively shite though.

From what I've seen they can make a fanwork clause or something and still retain hold of their stuff. I think that's what Sega does for Sonic. But I'm not going to sit here and pretend I'm a lawyer or know the ins and outs of how Sega deal with it.

Met wrote:I find it hard to feel much sympathy for this. Nintendo are completely in their right to do so and if you're going to try and piggyback off of someone else's property you really should see it coming. The amount of fangames that get announced and shut down mean it's an insane task to vet each one and while 99.9% are probably totally above-board and in-line with Nintendo's ideals, they can't guarantee that 0.1% where Link is going around stabbing babies for crack money isn't there.

It's easy to paint Nintendo as the big bad corporation keeping the little guy down, but they're right.

I have to disagree here.
Fan fiction and fan games have always been about and surely just show just how popular a series or character is? I don't think people are going to stop buying Nintendo products because they buy a few fan games or read fan fiction.
Huge franchises always have fan knock-offs but people will always flock to the real thing as Nintendo games in particular have a mark of quality fans expect and are willing to pay for. The reason Nintendo are doing this is the same reason the deliberately under-stock easily manufactured hardware like the Nes/Snes Mini and that's because they can and people will defend them no matter what.

Rax wrote:

more heat than light wrote:

Rax wrote:

Peter Crisp wrote:

Octoroc wrote:

NBK wrote:

rinks wrote:

Rax wrote:Or, the other thing, just let people make their fan games, theyre hurting noone.

(This is a niche reference, even by my standards. It’s good, though. I’m very happy with it.)

It took me a couple of minutes

Fifteen seconds

I'm going to admit my ignorance here as I have no idea what's going on which I freely admit won't come as much of a shock to most of you.

Not alone there, I have a Scooby Doo whats happening.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Noone

(less than fifteen seconds)

Im just more confused now.

The picture in rinks' post is of Peter Noone (lead singer from the band Herman's Hermits), apparently in some discomfort, either having recently been caused pain by someone, or expecting it (perhaps due to something being thrown at his face).

rinks took this from the misspelling of 'no one' in your post - the sentence ending "...they're hurting noone" - which is what the picture suggests