As you are probably already aware, fans finally released Pokemon Uranium earlier this week. However, it would seem as though Nintendo isn’t happy with the situation and has issued multiple takedown notices against the fan-made title. The team behind Pokemon Uranium has issued a statement and says that after receiving 1,500,000 downloads of the game they have since been contacted by lawyers representing Nintendo of America issuing multiple takedown notices. You can read the statement by the team, below.
Good thing I already downloaded it from the official site, I knew this day was gonna come….but not this quick!
||And you’re telling me this? Human, you have made a big mistake…||
Yea be careful Richard, the guy devoting his life to commenting on a Nintendo blog disapproves of your decisions you make in your own spare time.
Hey can u email the zip?
If they didn’t marked it as a Pokémon game, and tried to differentiate themselves from the brand, they probably would have a popular spiritual successor of sorts that they MIGHT get away with. Just look at the Fire Emblem vs. Tear Ring Saga case. Even though, Nintendo would chop ’em all to pieces.
Yes. Call them whatever they want, switch Pokéballs to muffins or whatever. It’s so easy.
Gotta bake ’em all?
Nobody would have cared if it wasn’t Pokemon
But it isn’t Pokémon anyway. It’s a fangame with ugly fakemons.
And actual pokemon. And some of the fakemons are beautiful. Metalynx is a major fave of mine.
Rin don’t be such a baby! This is actually very good for a fan game
But they would now after the attention :P But yeah, that is true. Would probably be the same story with Pokémon Go if it had not had the PKMN ™.
Duh.
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https://mynintendonews.com/2014/11/17/nintendo-ips-can-now-oficially-be-used-for-fan-projects/
I guess this never happened?
||I’ve made a mistake, the Creative Endorsement Program did not come from Nintendo, but was originally created by Nicovideo (Dwango) for plenty of works. Nintendo only announced that it’s titles are now eligible for it!
The Creative Endorsement Program was set up back in 2011 to reward creators who made highly viewed videos.
Sorry for the mistake.||
||This program is only applicable to Nicovideo.jp||
to be fair it looked bad.
It really didn’t. The only problem is lag, and they’re fixing it.
The problem on my end wasn’t lag, but I really felt the designs were deviant art tier at times and several entirely uninspired. I know you’re never supposed to like ALL the designs, but A lot of them make me groan at how bad the quality is. Cocancer being one of my least favorites using tacky bright colors that simply don’t mesh together at all. A very large portion are inspired by cats and dogs, making for little variety. Even the pokedex entries are often lazy like for one that LITERALLY looks like a wrecked ship in an iceberg, but somehow no one knows what the underside of it looks like when water is TRANSPARENT? Or how the grass starter line NEVER discusses any of its plant features, only its hard metal plating.
It’s the design perspective that made me completely uninterested in this game from the day I first heard about it three years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_izvAbhExY
Well you can tell by the way I use my walk I’m a lawyer man, no time to talk
We will not allow any game to escape our grasp since they’re our own
but then it’s all right, it’s okay, just look the other way
while we will try to stop this game and get it removed it right away
We don’t care if it’s fair use or not
Cease and Desist
Cease and Desist
I don’t care if it’s your stupid anniversary
Cease and Desist
Cease and Desist
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Cease and Desist
Cease and Desist
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Cease and Desist Ah! Muahahaaaaaa!
XD
No surprise there.
Meh, it looked like Karp anyway.
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Everybody KNEW that this would happen. I don’t even know why they bothered creating it?
Hasn’t this damn site learned nothing after AM2R!?
Stop making fan games news!
||Humans never learn, they repeat the same thing over and over every generation…||
Your the only to fucking. Just look at your pathetic ass. The Same fucking routine every single day, only to merely be vanquished by me again and again. Get owned bitch!
||And you are?…||
“Your the only to fucking.”
Am I the only one who can’t make sense of this sentence?
And hi hoe
https://pinkpossoms.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/winks-with-closed-eye.gif
9 years of “talent” wasted on copying a game… Good job
how was it wasted? them not hosting the download means literally nothing
Because copying a game is showing you can’t be original… and no, a game’s originality is not determined by it’s story.
And I don’t say wasted because the game was taken down.
I say wasted because copying a game doesn’t involve talent.
Hey! Listen! Shut it!
Yeah, and we’re all sure you could do better.
Why would I want to be better at copying a game? I don’t understand your logic. If you want to make a game, that’s fine, I wouldn’t bitch about it because you put effort in it. If you spend 9 years copying a game I feel like you could have made a cool original game instead…
It’s not “copying” anything. They didn’t do a fan remake of a Pokemon game; hell, they didn’t even use the game’s assets and sprites like most ROM hackers do to make fangames. They literally built a brand new pseudo-Pokemon game from the ground up. That takes effort, and it’s by no means wasted. I’m sure the 1.5 million+ downloaders agree.
Okay, let me be clear, I’m not just basing for the sake of basing.
The Pokémon brand was abused to gain popularity for the game. If it didn’t bear the Pokémon mark I wouldn’t have been troubled at all because they would have a fair start at square 1 and have to get noticed all by themselves. Now, because they abused the Pokémon brand to gain popularity, even though they created their own assets, they have chosen a much easier path. You say it takes effort? Create your own game. Totally your own. Without established IP’s to stand on. That takes effort. That takes dedication.
Ofcourse. Creating the assets, programming the game, writing the dialog, etc. takes time and creativity. I’ll give you that, they are creative, but they should have spend their time better.
Giving the game away for free doesn’t dismiss the abuse of the Pokémon brand. There is far more to gain then money only in this branch. The hardest part of being a game developer is getting noticed by the masses, and this is one of the most easy and cheap ways to do that.
If they’re able to make this fan Pokémon game lovable by 1,5 million of people I’m sure they could perhaps drive their own IP, and they should have done, and do that in the future instead.
first line should have been: I’m not just bashing for the sake of bashing
I’m sorry, why exactly do they have to take the hard stupid path to make a famous game? Are you saying because they took the easy, smart they are somewhat less game developers? Granted, they used someone else’s name to get a bit more notoriety, but as you yourself say and admit, they did everything from the ground up. Originality would have been an added bonus, but these guys wanted to make a pokemon game that fixed some gripes they had with the series, and thats what they set out to do(AND ACCOMPLISHED). They didnt wanna make a brand new game with brand new characters and story and lore and mechanics, all of which btw are impossible because you are always stealing someone elses idea, subconsciously or not. There is no ” true originality” as you think there is. And the thing is I think they probably could make it.
What im saying is, as game developers, they did a really good job. As marketing comes, they did an INCREDIBLY good job. You are mixing the two things. And you are seriously undermining how fucking tough it is to get recognized these days even if you have a stellar product. I know HUNDREDS of good quality games that are lost to oblivion because no one knows them, because they decided to be “original IP”. The game mechanics are fine in a lot of those lost games, the art design is stellar too. They would have lost nothing by associating with a famous brand, just tweaking some designs to include it in lots of cases, and gotten notoriety and praise as deserved. So you telling me these guys arent dedicated or didnt put effort because they did the smart thing? Laughable.
Source: Am game developer, have made games. I know the struggle.
“Are you saying because they took the easy, smart they are somewhat less game developers”, No, I’m saying they should not whine about being taken down. They are great developers, I’m sure they are…
“but these guys wanted to make a pokemon game that fixed some gripes they had with the series, and thats what they set out to do(AND ACCOMPLISHED).”, and that’s exactly the problem, they literally don’t have the right to distribute games with the Pokémon label on it….
“There is no ” true originality” as you think there is.”, I don’t think that… don’t make things up please….
“And you are seriously undermining how fucking tough it is to get recognized these days even if you have a stellar product.” No, I’m not, read this: “The hardest part of being a game developer is getting noticed by the masses.” I literally state what you say I undermine…
“I know HUNDREDS of good quality games that are lost to oblivion because no one knows them, because they decided to be “original IP”.” that’s indeed sad, but there are also cases in which it does work out…
“They would have lost nothing by associating with a famous brand, just tweaking some designs to include it in lots of cases, and gotten notoriety and praise as deserved.” they would have lost their right to distribute the game… so no, they wouldn’t have gotten the praise as deserved.
“So you telling me these guys arent dedicated or didnt put effort because they did the smart thing?”, no, I’m not. I merely stated it would take a lot more dedication to build your own IP.
So you’re saying you’re a game developer? Me too, but I don’t understand how you can dismiss improper IP usage like that? Would you like it when you spend serious money on creating your game IP and then see a fan project stealing part of your thunder because they chose the “smart” way and copied your game? Would you go to them and say like “yeah, because of you guys, my games don’t sell anymore and I lost a lot of money, but it’s okay, I’ll will the lottery someday and be filthy rich anyway.”? I can’t believe that for one second. Do you honestly think that when someone played 100 hours of this fan Pokémon game they are still going to buy Pokémon Sun and Moon…. I think most will, but there will be a chunk that decided not to. And that’s exactly the problem…
Replace Meg with Navi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjSk9krYg5U
Joking aside, there is a way to handle this without being an asshole & a bully to the little guys: buy their product & put it on their handheld as part of a collection of Fan Made Games, brought to you by Nintendo. The people that made it get to see their work loved by all & Nintendo gets to make a buck instead of coming off as an asshole & a bully. EVERYONE WINS!!!
So Nintendo should support over-saturation of their strongest IP’s… sure…
People just make sega fan games. at least they don’t take em down. Sega does what Nintendon’t
Sega does like Nintendon’t, like going bankrupt and raping their mascot up the asshole with crap games.
wait i think i said it wrong on the Sega does what Nintendon’t
Shame. I somewhat followed this one at one point in time. I love the fangane community even if I haven’t kept up with it at all lately but it sucks that the Nintendo related ones get shut down so quickly. I completely understand why and hold no grudge against Nintendo, I just kinda feel bad for the people who spend years of their lives making fan projects only to have them taken down so quick. That said this got a lot of downloads at least, so it’s not like nobody got to experience the final product, but I still feel for the fangamers, especially when they’re just trying to celebrate an overlooked anniversary or make something for other fans of forgotten/mishandled franchises.
“While we have not personally been contacted, it’s clear what their wishes are, and we respect those wishes deeply.”
An absolute lie. If they respected Nintendo’s wishes deeply then they would never have blatantly stolen Nintendo’s IP and allowed over a million people to share in that theft. If they cared at all they would have contacted Nintendo in the beginning and asked if they could make the game in the first place.
When are these thieves going to figure out that this is wrong and stop doing this?
I’d have to agree. Not in this way anyways. A kid makes a Pokémon hack for fun. Different story. An adult does it and wastes 9 fricking years on it. Whyyyyyy. Put effort into making a original game instead. Like the guy who made Undertale. Started out making hacks then made his own game. It ain’t that hard if you’re using crappy sprites anyway.
Not knowing that “theft” is huh?
technically they are using characters, and their assets
For free and free distribution while making no money off of it.
Apparently, you are not aware of the law. Free or not, it is still a crime.
It’s really not as what they do can be put under the “fair use” law as they applied many changes to the source material, made their own region, own story, and own characters without taking any ownership of anything they didn’t make. With the AM2R, it was more understandable since they WERE remaking an actual nintendo game while using some assets from other Nintendo games, but this only uses some pokemon and sprites from other games (and items, but that’s a given) and have made everything else on their own
No, fair use does not apply here. This is way beyond fair use. Look it up. The only way they could get away with using Nintendo Ip is to make it a parody.
You didn’t disprove anything I just said. You just said “no, you’re wrong.”
I told you to look it up and read for yourself. If you did so, you’d see that this is not covered under fair use. Since you didn’t look it up, here is a link so you can learn what fair use is.
http://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html
“Transformative uses are those that add something new, with a further purpose or different character, and do not substitute for the original use of the work.”
follow the series of copyright cases against richard prince, especially Cariou v. Prince and tell me that this fan made game was less transformative than adding a dot over someone’s face, or had more of an economic impact on nintendo than cariou being turned down from NYC galleries, not because they did not like his work, but because prince just showed his altered versions of his photos there.
copyright is hardly ever clear cut, and even when it is the person with more money usually seems to win. it pains me to see people defending copyright here when there are so many small artists getting their work jacked by major companies and getting screwed.
now if you wanted to make a solid case, what you would want to argue is that the trademarks were used.
They would lose on both counts.
O…m….g…what a shock :()
What makes this so odd is how many were left untouched before it. There’s a massive pile of romhacks that have been coming out for years, but they decided that this one had to be the first to get taken down? Ah well. Just another case of NoA being NoA.
They might not have known about it. This was just finished and downloaded massively. It could, in their opinion, rival their own official game sales. They don’t want people mistake it for a official game. TRUST me this happens all the time. More casual players may think they are real. Nintendo can’t controls what’s in them so any bad quality and content can hurt their rep. It makes more and more sense if you think about it.
True. I’ve seen fake Pokemon Games on eBay sold as real. People believe they’re the latest game and buy it. I’d suggest calling it Pokmeon: Uranium The UNOFFICIAL NON-NINTENDO Game, but sadly, many people still wouldn’t understand.
If you’re talking about the Darkcry, Naranja, Chaos Black, Blue Sea, or Quartz versions, then they are purposefully bought all the time. Physical copies of them are hard to come by with them being copied onto gba carts in very small numbers, and are pretty sought after with how good many of them are. As for people buying them thinking it’s the latest edition…that might make sense during periods where gba games were considered new, but they I doubt anyone would actually buy any of them thinking they were new nowadays.
and it’s not like the site you had to go to download it from didn’t already say “A Pokemon Fangame” right in the middle of the home page, or at the beginning of the trailer for it lol
Exactly. I just went and redownloaded Super Mario Star Road (a SM64 rom hack that has new levels, music, and skins) from the same site I got it from five years ago. It’s a wonder how it’s still up whilst this and AM2R got shot down within days of going live.
The aggressiveness with which these have been hit has noticeably increased.
If you pay attention, the ones that get the most attention from gaming news sites are the ones taken down. It would probably still be up if it wasn’t spread around on the internet so much.
If Nintendo catches wind of this that fast then I know they hear people saying their hype is dying.
C’mon NX reveal!
Not that fast at all. This came out the same day AM2R did.
||Register all hostile comments against Nintendo…||
Are we surprised? No.
https://twitter.com/PokemonUranium/status/764514827725316096
Stop doing shitty clickbaits titles, MyNintendo.
||After receiving more than 1,500,000 downloads of our game, WE HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED OF MULTIPLE TAKEDOWN NOTICES FROM LAWYERS REPRESENTING NINTENDO OF AMERICA. While have have not personally been contacted, it’s clear what their wishes are, and we respect those wishes deeply.||
||Where is this clickbait?…||
It’s the creators contradicting themselves, not the ones reporting. They said themselves they received contact with multiple lawyers concerning takedown notices.
No, the creators said they had ‘been notified of’ multiple takedown notices… they didn’t say WHO notified them. They did say however that they had ‘not been personally contacted,’ which makes me wonder if those takedown notices have been legit.
Of course, not having seen any of those takedown notices, I can’t judge whether they’re legit or not; I’d have to ask them about it.
It’s eye opening seeing articles like this and being reminded of how fucking young nintendo fans are, like holy shit. Most people posting here do not understand the internet at all, cease and desists mean nothing when it comes to free finished fan games.
It was inevitable which is why I got it immediately. Nintendo really needs to chill out, especially since this was built from the ground up and they didn’t make a profit.
This means literally nothing. As noted in the post, it’s received over 1.5 MILLION downloads. That’s 1.5 million people with the ability to reupload it elsewhere. No matter how many takedown notices Nintendo tries to shove down their throats, people are gonna have access to this game one way or another.
Looking up what they say on the Pokemon Uranium Twitter feed, it just seems kind of suspicious:
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And the reason it seems kind of suspicious is because I know from personal experience that trying to download this game could be frustrating because of how often the servers were down due to overuse. Overuse because of the game’s runaway popularity.
It seems to me like taking the game itself down, but continuing to provide updates and patches, isn’t exactly ‘respectful’ of Game Freak’s purported wishes. However, it’s still useful to the Pokemon Uranium team to take the game itself down so as to not have the server load of people trying to download the game itself, especially since they’ve had difficulty providing patches because the server load has been so high.
Now, I’m not saying whether this is the actual reason or not; only God and the devs know that. But I am saying that it makes more sense to me than the non-existent and hypothetical takedown notice claim, especially since the devs are still producing patches and updates.
And what makes this worse is that some people are saying that they won’t buy from Nintendo because of what they perceive this situation to be, when the devs themselves say that they haven’t been given any personal takedown notice by Nintendo. So this whole situation is just becoming bad press for Nintendo, and unfair bad press as well.
Lmfao… it’s funny to see Nintendo thinking this did anything in their favor xD
They should’ve scrapped the official pokemon and changed the name to something else. It would still appeal just like Undertale appeals to Mother fans.
i have to agree and nintendo won’t even bother even if the formula is the same as long as its says something like “pokemon fan will like this game which is similar to pokemon but its not” even though it is.
Sucks because I never got the chance to play it.
Well that’s 9 years of work down the drain.
Not really. A bunch of people have downloaded it to their computers & are playing it as we speak. Nintendo can’t do anything to the ones that have already been downloaded. Considering how many people have downloaded it, I’m sure the guys who made it are not upset at all about spending 9 years on it.
From the sound of things, they only target these if they actually make an impact. If only a couple hundred downloaded it, they wouldn’t give two shits about it being out there. But since so many downloaded it & are playing it… yeah.
Did you get this or AM2R?
Uranium isn’t bad for half an hour in. Sadly I didn’t get to Metroid fast enough.
Not interested in Uranium. As for AM2R, I was too late for that, too! D: Now instead of enjoying a nice Zero Mission like remake of Metroid 2, we both have to sit around & watch as we get more articles on FedshitForce. The suffering is real!
Ehh, maybe. I have yet to get Zero Mission or Return of Samus on VC, maybe I’ll save them for FF’s release date to buy and play.