Pokémon Fan Game Site, Relic Castle, Shut Down Following DMCA Takedown Notice

Well, Pokemon Fan games are basically illegal games with non official contents from the maker which can damage the image branding of Pokemon franchise.
I'm not surprised to see Pokemon Fan games get closed by Nintendo.
Now, go the Nintendo Ninja Squad !

Well, this is going to be another fun comments section. It's a shame we never get a concrete reason, so most see it as petty and does nothing to stop it happening again. I get the whole 'protecting their ip', or folk profiteering from it. Heck, I can even see how fan games are in competition with player's time (regardless of revenue.) DMCAs seem arbitrary because they aren't ever really explained in cases like this. Wish they were. All we have is 'Oi! Stop it!' Maybe some of the third party sites were dodgy. Who knows...

Why would you punish a forum instead of the actual fangames?

Gotta wonder if something WAS covertly hosted after all and got out of the bag. Otherwise, you'd think a DMCA should be pretty groundless and possibly autopilot (like many on YouTube) with default room for appeal that the admins' message doesn't quite sound to have attempted/considered.🤔

@Anti-Matter Agreed on the illegal and non official part. An IP should be respected, unless it's for parody or whatever can get around copyrights, like news reporting.

However, I do believe GameFreaks is doing a fantastic job destroying the Pokémon brand themselves with extremely poor quality games, so I understand why they don't want fans to risk setting the bar higher. That would mean having to give half a sh*t when GF creates a game. Or not, since the fanbase is just not bothered by the low quality as long as it's called Pokémon.

@PipeGuy64Bit It’s easier.

gotta love the nintendo/GF fanbois screaming that its illegal and for the greater good to destroy everything
sega hires the ppl who make sonic fangames and we got sonic mania
currently playing a pokemon hack for the first time, and im havin fun with pokemon that i havent had in years

@nhSnork You can make a DMCA claim for anything as long as you own the IP in question and the legal team to back you up. Nintendo and Game Freak can go on a power trip and decimate anyone on Youtube that makes videos featuring their IPs if they wanted and nobody could stop them

The major problem with pokemon fangames is that a lot of them use official assets. Getting them is just possible dumping the games to a PC and we all know what thinks Nintendo/GF about this.
I didn't know about this page, but if it hosted tools and fangames that used said assets DMCA could be valid.
On the other hand, congrats GF for destroying Pokémon community once more. Some day you'll destroy your own offices by mistake.

The source wasn’t mentioned. Is it safe to assume that it’s GameFreak/Nintendo? What could they be protecting with this DMCA? Could it be the half-hearted dross which doesn’t even run well on the console for which it was exclusively designed? They would be within their rights to protect their IP, and so we have the letter of the law. What about the spirit of the law? Is it proportionate and necessary to take down a forum devoted to fan games? I don’t know, we don’t have all the details. It does nothing for their image.

The Pokemon company is really sending the message that they don't care about the fans or the community, only their IP, and it'll only hurt them more.

I for one enjoy Pokemon rom hacks, as I grew up in the GBA era, and some of them are even better than the main releases for the Switch.

Banning "community forums" isn't going to change my mind or respect them any more.

As others mentioned, this is pretty disappointing because the kind of people who make and play these fan games are people who do support the main games and just want more Pokémon.

Wasn't it just last week that a former Pokemon Lawyer said that they didn't like suing fans, and didn't go after things that didn't involve money being made by the fanwork in question?

Common Nintendo/TPC L

Unfortunate, but that is the risk of using someone else's IP. Can't help the general mood of the Pokémon community either.

Maybe they could join together and make something of their own? There's tons of fan projects that become new(ish) games

@BLD my guess is they looked at the site and saw ads and went "Hey wait a minute!"
Anyways yea pokemon fangames are really hype this is just sad They are within their legal rights here, but i wish it didnt happen

@PipeGuy64Bit
That used to be the case. It took a lot of grassroots fan-activations to convince C-suites on the value of earned media; their was a club, and eventually The Nintendo Creator's Program was made- if your video was approved, most of that money would not go to a creator's pocket.

But returning to the development of fan games. Ultimately it is The Pokémon Company's (TPC) choice to go after projects. And it is your choice to support a company with your money.

I'm huge fan of Pokémon as an experience, and I hope for TPC to adopt a more amicable approach to fan-creations.

pokemon company: "we dont want a unofficial but a fun pokemon game for the pokemon fans... they should be content only in our crappy, buggy, subpar, never evolving pokemon game."

Just awful. Look at the modding communities for PC games, does that impact the games in any way except positively? If anything it just keeps games relevant. These fan games are made through sheer love of the IP, they aren’t being made for profit and they’re not even being hosted on the site. It’s just absolute saddo behaviour.

@Anti-Matter Calling it 'illegal' is a bit of a stretch.

There's a fine line between modded games and piracy, which perhaps majority of these mods were used on roms, but for the most part they can't call modded games illegal, and since its non-profit its practically fair use.

Most of these 'pokemon romhacks' were just gen 5 games heavily upscaled and reworked, to the same degree pikmin 251 is (wonderful mod btw). They weren't profit either.

Either we're in the dark ages where apparently modding a single player game is 'illegal' despite every game out there having a modding community and some games actually dependent on said modding communities, or pokemon/nintendo once again overstepping legal boundries just off the fact they're too intimidating to appeal against.

Makes you miss the early 2000‘s when DMCA-takedown was a foreign word.

That’s good, hopefully they crack down on cheating IN their games as well. It’s gotten really bad lately.

@Olrun
And what does Game Freak have to do with this, if they are busy developing their games? This is what The Pokémon company is for, they are the ones in charge of controlling the brand.

The problem with taking down that website is that very, very likely they found use of money, that is, there was commerce using the brand.
And that is the most obvious thing, if Nintendo/Pokemon company find something that generates money (even if it is little and they have been alerted) using some of their franchises, they will quickly act, because there really are too many fan games (and with very visible websites) and with many years of activity and they continue as if nothing had happened.

@SakuraHaruka yeah, totally my bad. I was thinking TPCi but my fingers betrayed me.

Goooo Nintendo!! Kill em all. We can’t have those fanboys!

@Anti-Matter While fanworks are in a gray area, they aren't strictly illegal. They only fall into legal trouble if they are directly using assets from the IP they're making a fanwork off of.

Ergo, not all fangames are illegal.

Those "nonofficial contents," are actually legal, as they are original work by the person or group in question.

You can't copyright ideas, so, say, if someone made a game that heavily borrows from Pokémon's mechanics, but uses none of its assets or even the branding, it'd still be legal.

So all the new monsters in, say, Uranium or mashups in Infinite Fusion are legal, as they are original works by the creators.

In contrast, the use of the Pokémon name and monsters belong to Pokémon aren't okay, but using the mechanics with your own designs and work is.

Either way, it's a rather disheartening situation.

Nintendo's lawyers are very competent lately... which is a shame!

@nessisonett PC mods also help both extend a game's life and generate interest for people that may not have either known or had any interest in said game or IP.

And making mods even lands people development jobs (i.e. Sonic Mania for example).

***** the big N. Never seen such an anti consumer company besides Apple, who actively makes their products run worse to punish you for not upgrading.

I did see a video on this, speculating it was because they offered downloads for Pokemon Essentials.

Time for the most prolific Pokémon fan game devs and modders to band together and create something truly incredible and original. There’s so much talent out there, it just needs to be redirected.

@SurprisedRobinChu taking down unauthorized use of IP =/= hating fans and the community.

Probably less than 5% of the fanbase even bothers with fangames, even less actually develop them. Taking them down doesn't somehow mean they hate anybody.

@PipeGuy64Bit legal teams and power trips are still on a budget, or we would never hear the end of those. They are normally sporadic to maintain a vague frequency of fighting media piracy and applied in comparatively egregious cases. Pursuing a forum simply discussing fanmade games risks lowering the plank of egregious to the point where one would be expected to chase every other social media commenter as well.