Japanese gaming giant, Nintendo, issued an order to take down the fan games that used the company's IP. More than 500 games have been affected with the takedown request.
According to reports, most of the games that were taken down are those uploaded on Game Jolt. Engadget reported that Game Jolt is a community where indie game developers upload and share their projects for free.
Most of these games are based on popular games such as "Metroid II," "Mario," "Zelda," "Old Man's Sky," "Duck Nukum," and "Pokemon." One of the games to be taken down is "AM2R," which is a remake of "Metroid II."
"AM2R" took eight years to develop and it just recently launched. This then makes the takedown order a crushing incident for the developers of "AM2R." Although "AM2R" was not uploaded on Game Jolt, it was issued a DCMA takedown. "AM2R" game developer, Milton Guasti, said in a statement that there will be no more updates for the game and no more releases under any gaming platform.
The takedown notice is said to be due to the fact that the makers of the fan games violate the copyright of Nintendo. Nintendo released more than 500 fan game titles and they have been since taken down. The order of Nintendo for the takedown of the games is completely legal as these fan games have injured the company's intellectual property.
In the website of Nintendo, they said that they respect the intellectual property of others and they ask users of their products and services to do the same. Nintendo added that they have adopted a policy of removing circumstances and other content that appears to infringe their intellectual property rights, The Daily Dot reported.
Nintendo also said that they could limit the access or terminate the accounts of Nintendo products and services users who infringe intellectual property rights of others.
Game Jolt also released a statement regarding the DMCA takedown notices from Nintendo. They said that they have published all DMCA takedown notices that they receive for transparency purposes. They added, "This does not mean that any users were guilty-only that we've received the notice."
In August, Nintendo also released a DMCA notice after "Pokemon Uranium" was released. It took nine years to develop the fan game.
