Recently, Nintendo removed 20 years’ worth of community-made mods from the Garry’s Mod workshop.
Garry’s Mod is a 2006 PC sandbox game built on the idea of letting the community modify the game any way they please through the use of the Steam Community Workshop. Many popular add-ons on Garry’s Mod directly use copyrighted material, with the caveat being that all of the content on the workshop is free and provides no profit to the creators of the add-on.
Nintendo add-ons were very popular among players for years, until this year when Nintendo contacted Facepunch Studios, the developer of the game, demanding the removal of all Nintendo content from the workshop, which Facepunch did immediately.
Facepunch put out an announcement on April 24th on the game’s community page telling players that “certain Nintendo-related workshop items have recently been taken down” and “the takedowns came from Nintendo.”
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Naturally, the community response was very negative, with many pointing out the extremely long amount of time it took for Nintendo to suddenly deem workshop content a problem. Another point of contention was that the content present in the workshop did not negatively impact Nintendo in any quantifiable way. Despite fan outcry, the removed works will most likely stay that way given Nintendo’s history.
Garry’s Mod is just one of the many high-profile targets of Nintendo takedowns. Nintendo has drummed up a negative reputation among fans for being extremely litigious, tending to threaten or take legal action frequently. A similar situation happened years ago with a game published by Sony called Dreams. Dreams was also a sandbox game that relied on community-generated content, and Nintendo directly contacted Sony to remove popular fan games based around Super Mario.
As much as it may hurt fans, it is important to remember that it is fully within Nintendo’s legal rights to perform these takedowns; it is their intellectual property and how it is used is ultimately their choice.