 fan projects. Nintendo. The two don't really mix together. Nintendo has been doing takedowns of fan-made projects for decades at this point. It really dates back to as far back as I can remember when I used to create fan Zelda websites on a place called Geocities.com. Anyone remember Geocities.com? I mean you can put that up in the annals of history like AOL Incident Messenger and I don't know MSN Gaming Zone? Heck, MSN Messenger wasn't that a thing? It's a look. Nintendo doesn't like fan projects, right? They've gone ahead and decided we are going to exercise every ounce of our ability to copyright our characters, our music, our whatever, our IP and not let fans have fun. Now, they don't take out everything of course to summarize Nintendo as they take out all would be strange. I literally use Nintendo's name as a company in the name of my channel. Nintendo's not taking me out. They're also not taking out other things like Nintendo Life or GoNintendo.com. Nintendo is very weird in how they decide what is worth keeping around and what's worth going after. Some things they're wildly consistent in when it comes to fan created websites that are distributing ROMs of Nintendo games. They want to take them out, especially true if those websites are making lots of money. That was a big thing that happened a few years ago. There was a massive ROM website that got taken out and sued to oblivion by Nintendo because they were actually making money off Nintendo's ROMs because he was charging for faster download speeds. And beyond that, Nintendo doesn't like obviously when people mess with their hardware enable things like piracy. Hello, Gary Bowser, $14.5 million of vines, three plus years in prison coming up. Yeah, Nintendo doesn't mess around. But that's obviously the extreme end. That's where your people are clearly committing crimes versus well, Nintendo just doesn't like what you're doing. As an example, it could be considered a crime that Gilda Center uploads a bunch of Nintendo music doesn't make any money off of it. It doesn't benefit him in any way. But well, Nintendo still exercises their copyright and takes out all of that music. But then Nintendo goes ahead and has given us express permission as well as any of the YouTuber express permission to use their music trailers or whatever in the background of their videos. So long as it's not just a straight re upload, and even then you can straight re upload their trailers now, which happens to contain some of that music. So Nintendo is wildly inconsistent in how they apply their rules. Oh, I can use their music as background music for free that I likely got from a source like a YouTube upload of an illegal copy of your music, but you can't upload it to listen to even though we don't provide an easy way to listen to the music. Nintendo is weird in that way. But see that's those again, deal with all things that legally cross the line. Not every fan project out there necessarily does that. At least we don't think so. The thing is, the reason Nintendo could take out all these fan projects in the first place is every single one of them violates what's known as copyright IP. The rights for Nintendo to control how, where, when, and in what form their characters take. No, Nintendo isn't typically running to deviant art or many of the other artists upload places and taking out individual pieces of still image fan art. Nintendo tends to leave that alone. All however, they sometimes go after you if you release merchandise based on that fan art. It's very rare. They actually do anything about it. I'll give you an example, tpublic.com. We have a web store there. There's tons of fan art all over that on t shirts for Nintendo that they haven't touched, but other outlets they do. Obviously on YouTube, we see a lot of copyright notices and takedowns of certain types of content created by fans. Some content seems to be left alone. Why isn't Nintendo going after all the Unreal Engine 4 and 5 Zelda videos out there? They don't touch those, but yet they'll take out something like Metroid Samus Returns, which ended up being a fan remake and they took that out because Nintendo had one coming, but also Nintendo's had HD versions of some of these games come out that appear in these Unreal Engine builds that by the way are often available to download and freely play. Nintendo hasn't done anything about that. Some of those channels are even making money running patreons and ads on their videos. So Nintendo's very weird. They don't like most fan projects. They've taken out a fan project for Super Mario 64, which enabled an entire stage to be played in Unreal Engine 4. They took that out, but they don't take out the Zelda ones. I don't understand. Nintendo again, they're extremely inconsistent in how they apply their copyright, but what I want to know is is this actually a good thing or a bad thing? Now, I think there's obviously always two sides of every coin and there's a lot of people out there that will defend Nintendo. There's also a lot of people that think what Nintendo does and how it handles these fan projects is, well, VS because most other companies don't handle it the way Nintendo does. Most just let it go when it does happen, but it should also be noted that Nintendo has more of these sort of projects floating out there than pretty much any company because they've been around the longest. If you think about Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo, Nintendo is the one that's been around the longest and has the most iconic of IP and this isn't me knocking Horizon Forbidden West coming out this week. An alloy, like she's a huge character and huge IP onto itself or the uncharted franchise, but none of them have been around for 30 years like Zelda and Mario, 25 years like Pokemon, like Nintendo has a stable of IP that crosses generations of gamers from basically all the way back predating the Nintendo Entertainment System with Donkey Kong. Nintendo has a long established giant list of IP that, you know, ends up leading to fans being more inspired than usual to make a Mario, a Zelda, a Metroid, etc. fan project. Now, before I say more about this, I will remind you we are giving away a Nintendo Switch OLED, a PlayStation 5, or an Xbox Series X. The winner gets to basically choose a current generation console of choice. Oh my gosh, I went there again. Yes, to one lucky person, go to the Gleam.io link down in the description or the pincom to enter. Now, look, one quick Google search where you just type in Nintendo takes out fan projects and you're going to be met with, you know, 100 plus different news articles talking about various things. You know, like CBR back in July of last year put up a post that says Nintendo's 10 most infinite shutdowns of fan games. And on that list includes a lot of really interesting stuff. We have, you know, Polka Net tried to bring all the regions of Pokemon together fan project. Nintendo shut that down. Another Metroid 2 remake, you know, we talked about that being taken out yet that was AM2R. Full screen Mario, which was like being able to play Mario in a web browser, the original NES version taken out by Nintendo. Zelda Maker was completely taken out by Nintendo as well. And while he tried to turn it into a different project later called Legend Maker, it never actually got off the ground and launched. No Mario Sky was a really funny combination of like a No Man's Sky and Mario in a 2D space. It was really crazy. Nintendo took that game out. Ocarina of Time 2D took literally Ocarina of Time and redid it into a top down Zelda game. Yeah, that was taken out by Nintendo as well. The Zelda 30 tribute, which took the original Legend of Zelda game and kind of gave it an isometric 3D view. Yeah, that was taken out by Nintendo too. Pokemon Uranium was like a original Pokemon game by fans, but obviously used Pokemon in its name. So Nintendo took that out. Super Mario 64 HD again, that's the one we talked about where they remade part of the game. Yep, yep, take that one out. And then obviously the game drill, Mass DMCA struck down hundreds. That was a more recent one that happened where a game drill had a hosting website of a bunch of fan games and that was taken out. And it just goes on and on and on. Nintendo continuously takes them out. And not every company is cool with fan games, by the way. You could argue, is Sega cool with fan games? Like, they hired some people that were making a Sonic fan game. It looked really, really good. And they obviously ended up making Sonic Mania officially for Sega. But while Sega's approach, you know, feels better. Hey, look, these guys are making a cool fan game instead of us shutting it down. Let's hire them to make an official Sonic game. That sounds great, but it also was sort of a pseudo way for them to shut down the fan game concept and just take advantage of the talent, which I don't think anyone's complaining about because we got a really good game in Sonic Mania. So apps for Nintendo, instead of taking out these fan projects, we would love to see them hire those people and just make those projects a real thing for Nintendo. Well, reality is, there's not really a direct answer. From a legal perspective, Nintendo is well within their legal rights. But I don't think when we talk about this stuff that we focus so much on the legal aspect. Because if you focus squarely and I just care about the legalities, the world does become a bit less fun. You want to talk about legalities? Have you ever gone one mile per hour over the speed limit? You broke the law. Have you ever gone one mile per hour under the speed limit? You broke the law. Have you ever roll stopped at a stop sign while driving? You broke the law. Have you ever walked across a street without using the crosswalk? You jaywalked. You broke the law. So let's just be clear here. Laws, they exist. They're important to help maintain order. But also some laws, it's a bit too broad and doesn't take into consideration every possible situation. Like you could have it where a U-turn is completely illegal in an entire county, but then there might be certain situations where it might be unrealistic to not make a U-turn on a back road because the next junction point is 50 miles down the road. And if you went the wrong way down the road, you're really expected to go out of your way 50 miles before you can turn around. That's a little bit not great there. So again, the laws don't always take into consider every situation. They're really broad spectrum. And this is why you often don't see tickets for jaywalking as an example because it doesn't take into consideration every possible situation where jaywalking might just be the best way or the safest way to actually cross the road depending on the situation you're in. So again, I don't want to focus so much on the legalities because we all know Nintendo as well within their rights to do this stuff or they won't be able to do it. So let's focus on is Nintendo right morally to do this? And that is not such a clear answer. If you're someone who heavily thinks Nintendo has the right to do this not just legally but you also think, hey, Nintendo should do this, you're going to think that it is you know, within their moral compass to take this stuff out. If you're someone that thinks this stuff doesn't hurt Nintendo, it helps promote their products, it just is fans expressing love, you're going to think Nintendo is wrong and you're going to massively disagree with them and maybe even get angry. In fact, both sides tend to get angry. Reality is there isn't actually a right or wrong answer to this. No matter what side of the fence you're on, both are Nintendo fans and fans of Nintendo products, you know, whether it's the systems or the games or the IPs, or maybe it's even offside stuff, maybe it'll be the movies or the stuff coming out here. Like you're both fans of Nintendo. That's not the question. The question is, which way do you go? Personally? I'm torn. There are some things I think Nintendo absolutely should do. While I hate them going after ROM sites, I understand them doing it. And if they made all these ROMs readily available to purchase on the Switch eShop, I probably wouldn't have any issue with them taking out all these ROM sites because then our Nintendo has a legit argument offering this stuff for free when we're still selling it hurts us. But Nintendo isn't selling all of these ROMs. Mother 3 is a fantastic example and never even came to the West. The only way you're going to get to play it in English is to use an emulator and use a fan created modification of the text for an English translation to even play it over here. So should Nintendo be taking out that ROM from the internet when I have no other way to play it in English? See that's a tough one. I think Nintendo is probably morally wrong. They're probably more morally wrong. They haven't released the game, but also morally wrong in that they're taking a piece of history away from people who might want to play it. On the other hand, fan projects and fan games, Unreal Engine Remakes, the Super Mario 64 3D stuff, Pokemon Uranium, I don't know how any of this actually hurts them in any significant way that means Nintendo has to take care of it. Pokemon Uranium blowing up isn't going to harm the Pokemon IP because let's say there is offensive stuff in there. Let's say within Pokemon Uranium there is somehow some Nazism getting pushed. Guess what? That wasn't made by the Pokemon company. It's not available on Nintendo systems. It's not sold on stores or online at Amazon or anything. It doesn't really hurt the reputation of the Pokemon company. And if stuff like this gets discovered in the game, it's not like the Pokemon company and Nintendo couldn't turn around and go, okay, yeah, that's harmful to the IP. Now we'll take out the game. So even if that stuff did exist, that would be the reason to take it out. But that's not the reason being used to take these games out. It's just you're using our IP too bad. Never mind that it might not actually harm anything, but too bad. Like I want to see a world where Nintendo is more accepting of the passion their fans show. They don't have an issue if you cosplay, right? You're literally dressing up as their characters and showing up to cons. Nintendo doesn't care about that. I can use their music and trailers freely in the background of my videos. Nintendo doesn't care about that. I can literally go and make a Zelda Unreal Engine 4 project and for some reason Nintendo won't touch it. But if I do Mario, oh, don't you dare touch Mario. It's inconsistent. It's unfair. And this is why you find me kind of fenced sitting on this one. So I'm going to leave this to you guys. What side of the fence do you stand on? What should Nintendo do about fan projects? Keep doing what they always do. Keep taking notes. Should we categorize these projects differently, whether it's music, whether it's roms, whether it's fan art, whether it's fan game creation. Maybe it all should just be in separate categories. In the end, it's all made by fans, like even hacking. It's done by fans. So let me know what you think or where you sit on this. I will know one technical point here. It's not illegal to modify your switch. So technically, go ahead and hack your switch all you want. It's actually not against the right. If you wonder why like team executor got in trouble, it's because they were selling gear that not only helped you hack your switch, you didn't need their stuff to hack your switch, but it not only to help you hack your switch, they created software and within that software that they were selling promoted piracy. So there was a pirate component to team executor being promoted. That's really what got them in trouble. If they had just been, Hey, look, we're going to help you hack your switch, 3d print some stuff, like they probably wouldn't have gotten that much trouble. But but they were literally doing it to promote piracy of switch games. So that's really what got them there. Again, not illegal to modify your switch. Go ahead, hack it, overclock it, put Android on it. Nintendo can't do anything about any of that stuff. None of that's actually breaking the law. Anyways, you guys let me know if you think about this down in the comments below. I am Nathaniel of the Chats from Nintendo Prime. Hopefully you enjoyed this discussion video today. News has been slowing down since the Nintendo director seems to always be a lull after a direct comes out. The things are going to start picking up because we got project triangle strategy and Kirby and the forgotten land that mull full mode, all that fun stuff coming up here next month. Obviously we have a massive studio thing happening. For those that aren't aware and you made it this far into the video, this set is enjoying it this week because this set's going away. You're not going to see this set anymore after this week. It's all coming down. But before it does, we'll have one final studio tour of the old studio. We'll talk about how everything worked in here. What we're doing to make it better, at least some ideas, some conceptual ideas and then it all goes down. There'll be a second video showing everything get torn down, floors get torn out, maybe walls repainted, a whole bunch of stuff. And then you'll see that video will end with the new floor put in and getting ready to map out where everything's going. And then the last video will be the debut of the brand new studio. And you guys can see how much different it looks compared to what it was before. And let me know if you think just off that initial video that it looks good, let alone how you see it in videos. Anyways, folks, I'm Nathan de Roble Janss from Nintendo Prime. Seriously, I am. It's cool. I'll catch you guys in the next video.