Nintendo shuts down fan made pokemon MMO

[Lunaria]

More info here:
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/04/02/nintendo-shuts-down-fan-made-pokemon-mmo/

Wonder why they did shut down this project and not others...

[snarfblam]

Maybe Ninteno wants their own pokemon MMO.

[personitis]

Because they realize how many people are playing it and felt it was taking away money from something they can do? Seriously though, if Nintendo want's to start getting places, they had better start listening to their fans. <_<

[Nu Zalem]

Fraking lame. I'm tired of reading or hearing about major companies (Square-Enix, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, etc.) issuing C&D orders on fan games. In my opinion it makes no fraking sense for said companies to just outright sabotage a fan project simply due to the fan project gaining no commissions (or much less any support outside of the fan base itself). These same companies over the past few years have been making games/consoles that have not delivered as well as they should be i.e. Starfox Command, Final Fantasy X2 up through Final Fantasy XIII, Halo 3, the loads of 3D Sonic games that are subpar at best, the PS3/X360 mostly having the same games on both system with a few exceptions so owning one ALMOST defeats the purpose of owning the other...particularly if you have a personal computer/laptop.

The multitude options you have with owning a PS3 is slowly being taken away such as backward compatibility and the ability to install another OS into the system which is somewhat counter-active towards purchasing the damn thing to begin with. The lack of third party games for the Wii despite its success is also quite lame. Despite all of that being known, the industry is still making money...why then are the asshole companies worried about some fan game that WILL NOT take money away from them in any way, shape, or form? Are these companies insecure about the jobs they are doing? Are they secretly holding something out? It remains a mystery. Another Metroid 2 remake and Starfox: Shadows of Lylat has been in the works for years, but Pokemon MMO gets the smack down laid upon it and for what!? If anything Nintendo should have let those fans make the MMO, bought it out from those fans, put it on the market, hired those same fans who made the game onto their team to potentially make Pokemon games with more inventive ideas and gotten even richer. Nintendo by itself can pay off all the debts of everyone registered in Metroid Construction forums, pay for our living expenses for the rest of our lives, and not even have to scratch their asses twice. I LOVE Metroid with all of my heart. I go no gripe with Pokemon either despite me not playing the games anymore, but Nintendo would rather divert attention from making an actually GOOD Starfox game for the Wii which is WAY overdue, or a Kirby game, or an F-Zero game and take the time to issue a C&D order on a fan game. They fail just like Square-Enix fails. Let the fans make the fangames...companies will get most of the glory for it anyway.

[Lunaria]

I would just like to add that, like stated in the article, there are like 10 or something pokemon MMOs in the work.

So, to be honest, this C&D makes no sense what so ever... they could at least have stated a reason as to why...

[Hiroshi Mishima]

I hate to be the unbeliever here, but do we have proof that they got a genuine C&D from Nintendo? I've been hearing rumours as of late that Nintendo and a couple others have become more ... well, active, I suppose, in regards to C&D issues. But here's the thing, they're so random and sometimes not even that well known, that it makes no sense that Nintendo or the other companies are the ones behind it.

Years ago, I remember hearing someone talk about a 3-D Chrono Trigger fan remake that got a C&D, but one of the things I also heard was that they made it up because they knew they'd never get it done and didn't want the fans to get disappointed by an unending string of progress reports. To which, they got in over their heads.

So since then everytime I hear about someone getting a C&D, I'm always skeptical. I mean the fan translation of MOTHER3 never got a C&D and they said from the start if Nintendo asked them to stop they would. Nintendo never did. There Will Be Brawl, a fan series based on Smash Brothers, it became very well known and had a large production and even was completed in December. Never heard anything about them getting a C&D, either. Instead what did I later learn about? A Zelda fan movie that'd been in the worlds for a few years, which I'd only heard about once and then nothing until they said they released it and it was taken down a month later due to legal issues.

By the guy's own admission, there are other Pokemon MMOs in the works, so maybe this was his way of saying "We don't feel like finishing this, but don't worry, there's plenty of others out there which'll probably be better."

So yeah, pardon me if I don't automatically believe this. The fact that it happened on April 1st is suspicious, as well.

[personitis]

More food for thought: if Nintendo is offering C&D on a PKMN MMO, they why the hell haven't they hit the hacking communities yet (knock on wood)?

* person701 knocks on his wooden desk.

I mean, I'd figure we might be high priority over some fan game... then again, we do hack older games.

[begrimed]

As some others said in that joystiq article's comments, Nintendo was well within their rights to shut it down. It sucks that they did, but an ever-developing Pokemon MMO that already had lots of participants and was slated to become HUGE was something that Nintendo couldn't bring themselves to overlook. They didn't do it just to step on their dicks. As the PokeMMO grew, the developers would no longer be able to support it financially on their own, donations would be needed, and donations would be given. LOTS of donations.

If the thing had like 500,000 regular members and a small percentage of them donated even semi-regularely, that's still quite a bit of extra money that could potentially go into the developer's pockets. I believe that's what Nintendo was considering when they killed it.

That's not to say I'm on their "side" - I can just kinda see why it was done to this project, and not some others. if I had my way, copyright laws wouldn't even exist; if the creator can't hold their creation to a higher quality than fan content based on their creation, then they deserve to be drowned out by superior fan content until they can get their shit together and recapture people's interest like they did the first time.

That aside, I never quite understood the logic of it anyway. I'd personally be thrilled if something of mine (a game, a story, whatever) was considered good enough to be interpreted differently by an outside party, and it's sad that money keeps a lot of other people from sharing this mindset.

At least Nintendo isn't a throbbing phallic asspuss like Squeenix, who shut down a very promising ROM hack project that wasn't even trying to capitalize (or COULD capitalize all that much, even if it tried). If Nintendo had any beef with ROM hacking, they would have targeted Super Mario World Central and Mario hacking in general a long time ago, because there's no way at least one Nintendo exec hasn't bumped into hack videos on YouTube. With all that in mind, I'd say we're safe.

[Quietus]

It's just unlucky.  When you consider that Nintendo, or whoever, could essentially shut down every single project going.  Anything from simply nicking one sprite, some code, or even sound effects (to a degree) or music - they're all only tolerated because the companies choose to do so, or at least while they are unaware.  Sometimes it feels like we should appreciate more of the stuff we do have, rather than what was lose.

[devonodev]

It would be great if Nintendo, the billion dollar family videogame company, would let others use their sprites and ideas to create a fun non-profitable game that others can play..  But unfortuantly, things don't work that way.

I believe that Nintendo know about SMW, and Metroid hacking, but why they don't bother to try stop it confuses me.
A Pokemon MMO would attract players that haven't played much pokemon, or players that haven't played a pokemon game in years. This would cause them to get interested in the series, and make them want to buy new pokemon games.
Hacking SNES games, and other consoles too, greatly promotes ROM distribution, and may cause some people to realize that instead of paying $10 for a game on Wii VC, they can just download it to their computers for free. And as an added bonus, they can play hacks too.


Now if Nintendo were planning on making their own Pokemon MMO, this would be a whole different story...

[Quietus]

It's usually fairly simply defined, and with Pokemon being current, it's jumped on (although there are still tonnes of other projects that haven't been touched), whereas the other stuff is old, and isn't worth protecting, as the revenue possibilities are much less.