Just recently, in a rare move, a former chief legal officer from The Pokémon Company publicly shared the company’s internal thoughts on the company’s occasional need to take down fan projects.
In an interview with Aftermath, Don McGowan stated that, at least for now, The Pokémon Company will not proactively target fan-made fan games unless those plans cross a certain line.
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“We will not issue any immediate removal requests to fans. Instead, we will wait and see if these games receive some form of funding, such as Kickstarter or similar methods. If these games involve crowdfunding, then We’ll take action. But no one likes to sue the fans,” said Don McGowan.
According to McGowan, he and The Pokémon Company’s legal team often don’t learn about certain fan games that use their copyrighted properties until they are reported in the media.
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“I’ll be sitting in my office, working on my own business, and then I’ll get an email from someone in the company with a link to a story about these fandoms, or I might just stumble across it on my own. I teach entertainment law at the University of Washington, and I tell my students, “One of the worst things in the world is when fan-made games get media attention because I now know they exist.” “He said
Even with this attitude, there have been many cases so far where “Pokémon” fan games created by fans have been completely removed from the shelves at the request of Nintendo officials. As recently as 2018, a fan developed a production tool that would allow players to create their own Pokémon games, but it wasn’t long before Nintendo stepped in. By 2021, a “Pokémon” fan game “Pokémon: Uranium” that had been developed for more than 9 years had completely stopped development due to Nintendo’s intervention. As for 2022, the Pokémon Company also forcibly removed a “Pokémon” fan first-person shooter game that became popular on social media.
Just earlier this year, “Pokémon Pallu”, whose design is very similar to “Pokémon” in many aspects, was released and sparked an enthusiastic response among players, setting a record in terms of sales and number of players. Quite an astonishing performance. After more and more players compared this game with the “Pokémon” series, Nintendo finally issued a statement in response, saying, “They will investigate this and take action against any possible We will take appropriate measures against any infringement of intellectual property rights related to the “Pokémon” series.”
It is worth mentioning that many lawyers said in interviews with the IGN website that Nintendo is unlikely to actually launch a lawsuit against “Phantom Pallu”. And just after this game became popular, a player created a module that replaced all the paloos in the game with Pokémon. Even the characters became characters in the “Pokémon” series. However, , this set of mods quickly attracted the attention of Nintendo, and they quickly issued a copyright warning to the producer, requiring him to completely remove it from the shelves.
