What’s worse is that nintendo likes to kill fangames shortly before announcing or releasing their own games that would be competing with them.
AM2R was killed for Samus Returns.
Project M for Smash Ultimate.
Pokemon Uranium for whichever pokemon gen was that year.
In each of these cases, it is my opinion that the fangame was the better game.
Speaking from experience, there’s a very different mindset between Japanese and North America in regards to fan made stuff, like mods, etc., to the point that I was told to stay absolutely shut about my love of emulation and fan games when having dinner with a certain JP dev friend of my wife’s. By contrast, a US dev friend literally was showing me his emulator keychain, lol.
Sega is a weird case, though, because they’re both US, European, and Japanese in equal parts (to the point that if one flops, they all feel it). Leads to some interesting debates across teams though, or so I’m told.
Can’t speak of Nintendo of America, though. They’re up in Washington iirc, so I’ve never met anyone from there.
I have been told that is shaped by IP law in Japan being extremely strict, but I don’t know if thats true.
That being said, as someone who loves AM2R its my understanding that Nintendo had a remake in the works before AM2R was released or something to that effect. I’m glad they waited until it was released to get shut down, cause people reverse engineered it, and last I saw its still getting updates and has both a PC and android release. 10/10, highly reccomend
Law is shaped by society, though.
IP law in JP is absolutely atrocious, Japanalysis did a video a bit ago about it. Like, WIKIPEDIA can’t even use official images or merch for their pages, so they just use shitty pics similar to the thing, like this pic of a dude cosplaying Squirtle:
Youtubers/streamers can get sued for revealing the whole plot of a game I guess, so don’t play too much of an RPG or Visual Novel game… Actually, Atlus, a Japanese companu owned by SEGA, put a gameplay limit on Persona 5 when it first came out and told streamers that they couldn’t stream past a certain date! Scarlet Nexus did similar “no streaming” shit but like, on the whole game and I think it flopped lol.
For some weird reason, Doujinshi (self published manga) is allowed and flourishes, despite it literally being just fan manga/comic/fiction of some other media. And like, WILD fan depictions too (All those yaoi doujin of Naruto, Ace Attorney, Hetalia, etc.). I love doujin but it’s fucking hypocritical imo to get mad at people for posting official content on a damn wiki site but let them sell manga of characters fucking 😅 i should research the reason honestly.
Idk if it really does affect how these companies respond but it fucking sucks to keep killing fan projects, ESPECIALLY if they make no money. I get why anything that makes money shouldn’t have a copyrighted IP or material in it but companies will be assholes.
Jesus Christ, thats way worse than I realized 😅
Thank you for explaining and providing so much context! Always love when I get to learn stuff from folks ☺️
Yeah, amen for articulate intelligent folks providing history, culture, and context that illuminate the truth of the situation.
Total antithesis of all the dummies on lemmy who just want to hate on things because it makes them feel smart and strong.
wild that the meme community here is more informed than the nitwits in the technology community who just spam that game companies are diabolical and evil.
The lack of self-awareness here is hilarious. Just jumping in completely unprompted to say how nice it is when people don’t hate like in that other community that you hate so much.
Corporations are not your friend. I like learning and understanding the global context things happen within but thats not good reason to heroize corporations who don’t care about me. If a company’s practices are anti-consumer it frankly doesnt really matter why, consumers are entitled to being unhappy about it.
I would imagine the doujinshi is allowed as long as it’s still fan made. For instance the Wikipedia page has a fan made cosplay of Squirtle. By the same logic as long as the manga’s depiction of Squirtle is also fan made (or drawn) then it also seems to get a pass.
It would seem the issue is less how their assets are used and more that their specific assets are used.
You can even get jail time if you stream or upload a video of the entire game. Someone was sentenced to two years because he uploaded a video of the entirety of a visual novel.
WIKIPEDIA can’t even use official images or merch for their pages
Is that a voluntary compliance thing? Unless the wiki servers were based in Japan they wouldn’t be subject to Japanese law about what images they can host, right?
I imagine any users contributing from Japan could be subject to penalties under Japanese law though, and if Japan wanted to fight it they could start blocking Wikipedia as well.
Valve was at one time very likely to just hire you and your team to make a spiritual successor or sequel to your own game for them.
The devs for Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Narbacular Drop (aka Portal), and, at least for a time, Turtle Rock Studios, were all working directly for Valve. The only one I am pretty sure is still there is Robin Walker (TF).
Dota as well, and IceFrog is still there, now leading development on Deadlock from my understanding.
Dota 2 was straight up Valve showing Blizzard how it’s done. It’s embarrassing.
Dota was never made by Blizzard?
afaik it was a mod for warcraft 3
wait, got a link to the story behind SEGA’s?
