Nintendo Is On The Hunt For Videos Of Fan-made 'Pokémon FPS' Project
Nintendo's notoriously long DMCA hammer has thwacked another fan-made project, this time a first-person shooter where you could load Pokémon's faces with bullets.
The project came from Redditor Dragon_GameDev2, a humble fan creator who, over the course of a month, got a prototype of a game in Unreal Engine where a player would be dropped in a forest with modern weaponry and set loose to hunt and defend themselves from various Pokémon.
Last Tuesday, Dragon_GameDev2 showed the game in action on Reddit. Surprisingly, the post is still up, so viewers can still get a sense of what they're working on.
Unfortunately, footage of the game on YouTube and Twitter has been hit with Nintendo's infamous legal strikes. All the content from Dragon_GameDev's YouTube channel has been erased, including the clips on his Twitter account. One can still find stray reuploads of the footage with a little digging, but it feels like only a matter of time until those get taken down as well.
Last month I started working on developing a Pokémon First Person Shooter. #IndieGameDev #pokemon pic.twitter.com/dZZTuYWq22
— Dragon (@Dragon_GameDev2) January 17, 2022
It's yet another example of Nintendo being notoriously guarded about fan-made games featuring their IP. In September 2020, Nintendo discovered a very NSFW, fan-made Mario game starring Peach and killed a project that had a small fanbase for eight years.
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Fire_Mario
I can understand that people are reacting negativly to the news that Nintendo is trying to shut down fan-based projects related to their IPs. What annoys me is that a lot of people don't realize why Nintendo is doing this, and it has to do with Japan's copyright laws. Japanese copyright law states that in order to use a copyright holder's IPs (of any kind), a person/group must request written authorization from the copyright holder – in this case, whoever created that FPS; must request written authorization from Nintendo to use their IPs in a fangame. Based on Nintendo's reaction to this fangame, the fangame's creator didn't request authorization from Nintendo.
Yes, Nintendo is protective of their IPs, but they also have to follow Japanese copyright law. Nintendo also aware of "fair use" afaik. and to be clear, I'm not defending Nintendo here.
in short: "Fair Use" doesn't exist in Japan, so you have to get written permission.
TheStupidRaptor
Why is it all gen 1 Pokemon?
Fucking genwunners.
Pokejoseph64
Honestly considering the context of what he was doing, yeah it was bound to happen and it was all on him
Jon the Wizard
Dude, don't shoot Nidoking! Go shoot Stunfisk, no one likes that thing.
Molemanninethousand
Identify the individuals at Nintendo who are responsible for this consistent pattern of abuse, track down their locations, and personally confront them to force them to stop.
The same goes for any and all other companies persecuting fan labor.
Molemanninethousand
Non-profit fangames are always legal. This standard needs to be enforced by any means made necessary by those who would deny that right.
0000000000000x0as2
You had me until "by any means necessary."
And to be clear, I mean beheading CEO's is fine, but verbally accosting the peons responsible for enforcing corporate policies is not.