Nintendo gets a lot of flak for how they treat consumers and how litigious they are. However I get the impression they treat their employees very well in Japan. Like when the Wii U flopped, execs took a pay cut to avoid layoffs.
No company is perfect, but Nintendo seems like an example some C-suites should follow.
Its not even like they indiscriminately shut down fan projects either. Just the ones that try to make money. You still have sites like Pokemon Showdown and Advance Wars By Web that have been running for several decades without incident.
My friends and I made a game for Ludum Dare 36 called No Mario's Sky years ago and received a DMCA take down notice. We weren't selling it, but we still had to remove it. Maybe because Mario is 100% a Nintendo property but Pokemon and Advance Wars are co-owned with other companies.
That's just not true. Off the top of my head: SMBX, Pokemon Uranium, Ocarina of Time 2D, AM2R. A few years back they mass DMCA'd hundreds of fan games on the site GameJolt, none of which were monetized.
(why some fan projects like Showdown are still up is anyone's guess)
IIRC Showdown has a tacit agreement with TPC (or at least has historically; unclear if Champions will change anything in the future) and is allowed to exist so long as it follows certain rules. I can't find it right now, but I swear I read a comment from Zarel, the creator of Showdown, explaining what some of those rules entail, including an agreement not to include any moves or mons that haven't been officially released in the mainline games yet.
Other people have speculated that TPC can't/won't axe Showdown because they know that VGC players rely on it heavily to test out team comps before official tournaments, and Champions doesn't seem like it fills the same niche, unless TPC is suddenly about to change their stance on genning :P
AM2R for example was distributed for free and DMCA-ed.
I think they killed it because they were planning on showing off their own remake
I think there are 3 rules to avoid getting the ninjas sent after you:
1) Don't try and make money 2) Don't do anything nintendo would realistically do 3) Don't touch mario. This one seems to be the most important. I see mario projects get killed all the time very early on in development, while am2r was allowed to exist until nintendo exercised rule number 2. I imagine the mother/earthbound fan works/translations will also be left alone if nintendo chooses to never touch that series again
I feel like a toxic part of this cycle is that a successful fan project has the potential to actually inspire Nintendo to attempt to do the same thing, leading to #2 as a punishment for success.
I agree, though 2 seems pretty tricky to navigate/predict. For example I wouldn't have guessed Advanced Wars would get a new release after Days of Ruin, or with Earthbound I could maybe see Mother 3 finally getting a US release with how popular Undertale/Deltarune has been. Maybe the best option is to be as under the radar as possible until it's done and out.
I can almost guarantee mother 3 will never get an official translation. At most, I can see them giving the existing fan translation their official endorsement and releasing the patched version on switch online or something. The only reason earthbound beginnings got published eventually was because they had already translated it and planned to release it in the west but never ended up doing so
they indiscriminately shut down any sight of online smash tournaments
Probably for the best seeing how many literal degenerates and sex pests there are in the scene, what with Nintendo being a family company and all.
edit: sorry downvoters, if you want to play with corporations you might want to remove the rapists from your ranks:
https://www.ssbwiki.com/2020_Super_Smash_Bros._sexual_miscon...
When I was a kid this Japanese guy from Nintendo used to live next to us. He gave me the Nintendo DS before its official release for my birthday. It was pretty cool.