Nintendo has 379 fangames removed from Game Jolt with takedown request
A total of 379 Nintendo fan games have been removed from the popular Game Jolt gaming community after the platform faced a DMCA request from Nintendo. According to Nintendo, the games infringe its intellectual property and trademarks.
The request to remove the games was published on GitHub by Yaprak DeCarmine, a co-founder of Game Jolt. It shows that Nintendo mentions a laundry list of URLs that all stand for the various games that according to the Japanese company infringe. The letter includes a request to disable public access to these URLs. That has already happened; the different urls now lead to a page not found message on the Game Jolt website.
According to Nintendo, the games infringe trademarks of games such as Super Smash Bros, Pokémon and The Legend of Zelda. The company says that quite a few of its 379 games use or otherwise use or copy elements from existing Nintendo games in an unauthorized manner. Games Jolt would also benefit financially from this, Nintendo says. In addition, the Japanese manufacturer states that “use of the copyrighted materials” is unlikely to be approved by the rightholder or in line with the relevant laws and regulations. On that basis, the company says it would appreciate it if all infringing content was removed.
Game Jolt is an indie game website, where users can upload their homemade games. It is quite a large and active community where many Nintendo fans are active. Many users have expressed their dissatisfaction with this move by Nintendo on the website. For example, there is a user who complains that Nintendo previously banned emulators for playing games on consoles that are no longer available, and that it was then the music’s turn. The user argues that the request to remove the indie games is an abuse of the DMCA law, and people put a lot of work into it and a lot of people enjoyed it. A developer also expresses his dissatisfaction with the Nintendo practices.
Nintendo is known for being very active in protecting its trademarks and intellectual property and often makes DMCA requests to have what they consider to be infringing content removed. It’s also not the first time the company has specifically targeted Game Jolt. In 2016, Nintendo forced the site to take 562 fan games offline.