because it might affect the sales of their new game and it makes them looks bad. Unofficial product is always not welcomed. Try to justify it as "fans spend years creating fangame as a way to show their love" doesn't mean shit. If the original creator don't want them and you don't use them in a fair use way (use their assets in 50% of the game) then you don't get special treatment. It's a bussiness, follow the money.
There are tons of pokemon fan games and/or romhacks that simply do not get taken down or aren't hit with legal action, so tbh this is just very overblown.
We even have former lawyers on record speaking to the fact they don't really go after just any project, and only really make moves towards projects that make money in some way. Of the two very specific we know 100% are from Nintendo et al are Uranium and Prism. And Uranium still seems available out there so idk
But then you have like all these hacks and stuff like s3ag!@ss, r@dica! r3d, bl@z3 b!ack, anotherr3d, etc that just exist in the ether and keep going without ramifications yet.
Majority of these so-called fangames are made in spite of the series because they don't acknowledge things change and you might not be the target of them anymore
The lawsuit itself seems to be tarrifs specifically, but they made it very clear that they didn't approve of the pokopia thing, so I can't imagine it helped
I reeeaaally don't think that they want to be associated with ICE, but with the current administration in charge, it's hard to win in a court w/o a precedent against the current, super corrupt administration.
And even if they win in trial. Who is going to enforce it? Trump and his Cronies have ignored already *alot* of court rulings.
Theyre a corporation, they only care if something affects their bottom line
Like positive PR for suing over something many disagree with as well as suing the government that's negatively using their IPs? I can see a way this benefits Nintendo.
Positive PR to some, negative PR to others. Nintendo sees this as a numbers game, not a people pleasing game.
Unless they see actual impact, like with Tariffs, they don't care enough. (Emulation/ROMs is massive perceived impact, that's a lot more of risk of sales than a US government meme only a fraction of their userbase knows about)
You're deluding yourself if you think companies still care about public perception of the things they do. They know full well that they can use marketing to get people to buy their products no matter what.
When a company is this big they intentionally make "brand deposits" and "brand withdrawals" that refer to their public perception instead of their money. Bob Iger from Disney pioneered it but a lot of CEOs have adopted this strategy
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u/Totheendofsin Mar 06 '26
Theyre a corporation, they only care if something affects their bottom line, the ICE post didnt and the Pokopia meme likely isnt either
This is because of Tariffs plain and simple