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+--- Thread: Nintendo v. Their Fans (/showthread.php?tid=6987)
Nintendo v. Their Fans - A Black Falcon - 1st September 2016
So, in recent weeks, Nintendo has gone on a spree of shutting down fanmade games that use Nintendo properties. First they got a free-to-download Metroid 2 fan remake taken down immediately after its release, which is a really scummy thing to do when Nintendo has no interest in making that kind of game themselves (I've played the Metroid Prime Federation Force: Blast Ball demo that's currently available for 3DS, and I do think that it is fun, but it's obviously quite different from a 2d Metroid game...). That was a really bad move, though waiting until after it was released does ensure that people will continue to be able to find it somewhere.
Now, today, Nintendo struck again, by issuing DMCA takedowns on over 500 games on the free indie game site Game Jolt. I've never heard of it before, but here are the details: http://techraptor.net/content/nintendo-game-jolt-dmca On the face of it this is another really bad move, but the article's update does say that creators make 30% of ad revenues from ad views on their games, so it IS likely that people were indirectly making money off of Nintendo IPs that way. But still, the users pay nothing, so I do think that this is an overall bad move for Nintendo to make. If people are selling un-licensed Nintendo-IP titles for money, sure, take them down, but going after free games that make some probably small amount of internet ad revenues off of the game? While it is maybe defensible, it's a very borderline case.
So yeah, anyone else have any thoughts on this?
Nintendo v. Their Fans - Dark Jaguar - 1st September 2016
Nintendo is well within their rights to do this, I'm not going to dispute that. I would also point out that these fan games could easily change a few details, remove Nintendo IP, give their games a fresh coat of paint, and Nintendo couldn't touch them. More than that, they could charge money for their game. They'd even be free to put right in the game's description that it was inspired by this or that Nintendo IP. A prime example would be Pokemon Uranium. There's a game with a large number of critters they created just for that fan game. Make it a pokemon clone. By all accounts, it's a good fan game, so I would say they should go for it.
However, I think you want my thoughts on how Nintendo specifically are handling this. In a word, poorly. Now, Nintendo are not the first and they won't be the last. (Remember the fan remake of Chrono Trigger getting C&D'd to oblivion?) In Japan in particular, game companies don't seem to know exactly how to handle situations like this with any grace. Capcom had one lone exception when they out and out promoted a fan-made Street Fighter/Megaman crossover game. Yes, they have the RIGHT to do it, but that hardly mandates that they do it. I'm not suggesting the law needs to change. Allowing companies to defend their intellectual property is needed, but a company is free to decide for themselves if they should bother. For cases like these free fan games, it isn't a kind thing to do. It isn't a necessary thing to do. It isn't even a profitable thing to do.
Let me take a moment to address one big part of copyright law. A work of copyright that a company doesn't defend, or at least is shown to BE defending, is one that becomes null and void. This is more of a rule of thumb than an absolute, and it really only comes in cases where a company has no intention of actually using that copyrighted work ever again. So, a company is indirectly obligated to defend their trademarks and copyrights or risk losing them entirely. To me, this makes sense. Think of the number of companies that have simply faded into the ether, taking their copyrighted works with them. This exception means that if some cranky lone old man, decades from now, sues someone for releasing a vapor property game online JUST to keep it from vanishing entirely, they won't stand a chance of winning their case because they've clearly abandoned the property. However, companies are free to make individual exceptions so long as they actually speak with the group in question. If a company tells a fan group "technically this is in violation of copyright, but we hereby grant you permission to release this fan project under such-and-such conditions", it demonstrates that they do still care about the property while not screwing over fans.. I'm no lawyer, so I've certainly got a lot of the details wrong, but I can site a number of companies who have done exactly this sort of thing.
Let's look at the US now. There's still plenty of US companies that will C&D a fan project at the drop of a hat (EA comes to mind, and MS isn't much better), but at least we've got some companies willing to make exceptions to please the fans when it's clear the fan project isn't any real financial threat to the company. Activision, having bought Sierra's old properties, could easily have shut down all the fan remakes and sequels to the old Sierra IPs. However, they didn't. To this day, they've basically left those fan groups alone. The most they did was an initial C&D against the fan sequel "King's Quest 9: The Silver Lining". However, they ultimately changed their mind and gave it their blessing with the only caveat that they change the name of the game so that no one confused it for an official sequel (a reasonable thing to ask for). The project is now simply "The Silver Lining", but it's still a sequel with the same characters in the same continuing story. (As a side note, it bugs me that they never actually finished the final chapter of that fan game. They've moved on to other properties since then. I mean, I get it, using unique IPs means they can actually make money off their work. Still, it's annoying to see work unfinished as a fan.)
The best example though has to be Valve (well, Valve back when developers weren't "retiring" from their company left and right and they were actually making games). Every time someone made a fan project based on their property, well, they let them. If it was exceptionally good, they flat out HIRED them. It led to Valve's most successful years. Of course, Valve was snapping up indie talent left and right in those days anyway, but the general attitude was that the fanbase and the company were symbiotic. Heck, even to this day Valve has just published that long-running fan remake of Half-Life 1 on the Steam store. It just doesn't get much better than that. They also put a fan project to enhance the graphics of Half-Life 2 up there, and some fan-made half-life mod enjoys a pretty prominent place in the store search results for Half-Life (that last one is a pretty lame mod by all accounts, but that's not the important thing here).
So first thing I'd say is this. Nintendo needs to support their fans better than they are doing. It'll be a big shift, since we're talking about something Japan's gaming industry as a whole hasn't really gotten the grasp of, but Nintendo in particular is too big to get away with it in the way smaller companies might. The sheer fact that Nintendo and Nintendo alone are the ones that are getting called out like this is a testament to that. Everyone pays attention to them and what they are doing in a way a company like Square-Enix (which is still a large company) could only hope for. They're in a position where they really need to think this through for that reason alone. Backlash on them is FAR higher than it was on Square-Enix for cancelling the Chrono Trigger fan remake.
So, clearly they need to act, and they're in the unenviable position of having to be leaders in their country's game industry in how they handle it. Fortunately, they just need to look further. Copy Valve. There, I said it. Start slow, just do that thing I suggested above and publicly give these fan groups your blessing, so long as they oblige Nintendo on a few basic things (like not making any money off the fan work, and probably not putting any content that would ruin the brand like, I dunno, inserting a FMV of a porn spoof of the property in the middle of the game, or making Samus a neo nazi enacting her final solution to the metroid problem). That'll be a good start while, in the long term, they do some internal restructuring for the second phase, setting up some shell studios they can fill with talent they hire from the especially good fan projects.
Frankly, I feel sorry for the people at NOA. I'm sure there's plenty of employees there that are shaking their heads right now at Nintendo's poor handling of modern fan projects (don't forget how they handled Youtube "Let's Play" videos, though frankly there's a lot of blame to go around with both Youtube and the DMCA on top of that). Howards Phillips & Lincoln had a lot more control over the US portion of the company back in the old days. There were some bad parts to this, such as how vastly they redesigned the NES and how liberally they handled localization (not to mention some outdated notion of what games US gamers wanted to play cutting us off from a number of ports), but the good parts were in just how much they clearly cared about fostering a good relationship with the public. From the "Fun Club" to Nintendo Power to the crazy giveaways of entire games to the incredible pack-in materials they put in the larger projects (like Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior), it was clear that they were working every day to figure out new ways to make sure video gamers were being wooed at every step. Just think of the sheer volume of peripherals on the NES. The vast majority of them were nothing more than reworked versions of the NES controller, and yet all of them became classics. That NES Max was great specifically for games that required a lot of rolling the d-pad, and the Advantage is a thing of legend. Another good step for Nintendo to take would be to loosen the reigns a bit and allow creative ideas like that to spring forth again. If they come up with something especially well received in America, Nintendo Japan could, and should, make that idea a global one and adopt it for Japan as well (even during the old days, good ideas from NOA never quite managed to hop the pond back to Japan). These days, most of those "good ideas" are likely to take an online form anyway, so it'd be important.
Basically, I think Nintendo has become a bit too regimented, and they need to lighten up a bit and be a bit more cooperative with the public.