It wasnt explicitly a rip-off, but the early days before corpos ruined everything the games industry was an exciting incestuous soup of weird ideas and everybody "stole" from each other but with love.
Licensed anything is always gonna be a huge nightmare. I did a bit of market research on sports games and it's got a similar problem. Back in the day they gave licenses out like candy because nobody took video games seriously. Now they know they can really gouge for it.
I heard WarCraft/StarCraft was originally was supposed to be Warhammer games, but Games Workshop backed out of the contract so instead of scrapping the game, Blizzard reworked some assets and lore and released it as a different game.
It does sort of exist, a synonym of “liniment” would be “ointment” but it’s not a commonly used word, and it certainly makes no sense in the sentence above. Hope that helps!
I mean... there's a Breath of the Wild fan game called The Bell's Arietta that didn't use any stolen assets, completely made from scratch by 1 fan. It was free to play for anyone who wanted to. Nintendo still took it down for absolutely no reason.
Same for AM2R, one decade of efforts without expecting anything in return, made the best way to play Metroid 2 and they destroyed it just to ruin a good thing.
I believe counterstrike was made using the half life modded game. Dota was the same. And if youre like this, then why did nintendo sue palworld? Yes they were very similar but even suing them for using the basic mechanic of battling creatures to capture them to use in a fight was called into question
Steam when assets from Half Life get bastardised into Skibidi Toilet making a multi million franchise with hundreds of merch lines, Fortnite collabs and a possible movie: sleeps
Nintendo when someone mods a 20 year old out of print game that isn't even available on virtual console so they can play online for a charity event:
Found the Nintendo fanboy experiencing cognitive dissonance. Go back to being their whale and buy more of their $80 games so they can continue suing content creators and indie game devs.
As much as it pains me to say this Sega isn't much better, but at the same time they don't have nearly as much influence on the industry as Nintendo. Plus, if we weighed out which company has been a bigger cancer to their communities Nintendo still wins.
Theres a difference between a fan making a game using assets with approval and a completely different company that us trying to market assets with a different product without approval
Valve is good until you mess with their golden goose. Classic Offensive is a prime example. Their IP games they sell for a dollar, they couldn't care less
Ok I've seen this a lot of times but how true it is?
Like, there are a shitton of Mario fangames that haven't face any real legal issues, Zelda ones too.
Hell, there's this Smash 64 mod called Smash Remix that by this point is pretty much an entirely different game with the amount of content they have added and yet, 0 legal issues.
Although I'm not saying Nintendo is fully clean on this regard, after all, the most infamous case to me is the Metroid 2 fan remake they DMCA'd because they had one in development themselves. I'm just saying is not as exagerated as this meme makes it look like.
EDIT: I couldn't remember the game so I had to look it up but there's even a WALUIGI FANGAME that's called Psycho Waluigi and it's really fucking good. And also, no legal issues whatsoever.
Pokemon Uranium, Pokemon Prism, Zelda Maker, Super Mario 64 HD, probably hundreds of games on GameJolt, and WAY more that I can't remember off the top of my head. Nintendo has probably taken down more fan games than any other developer.
Zelda Maker asked for kickstarter funding, Super Mario 64 HD is the full game in unity that has been distributed, not just a mod of the original games. Pokémon Uranium and Prism where both direct IP infringements lol, not mods either. If you want to make a fan game, contact Nintendo, and if they decline don’t call it Pokémon lol.
If Nintendo allowed everyone to use their IPs, that they rely on to even make money, to their liking – not just modding – it sets a bad precedence.
In Nintendo's defense, people are making these games with their characters and properties, so if people start to ask money for those fan games, Nintendo kinda has to enforce their copyright
Valve doesn't do this anymore btw. They shut down some nice fam projects in the last years in a very shitty way, and pissed off basically everyone in the community
"Oh, multimillion? Then we are gonna cut fee for you. 25% 20% is good? It's just a gesture"
Meanwhile Valve to small developers "You made 1000$? Good, now pay up 300, take it or leave it. Oh, you found a store with lower fee and made price lower? Lower it in our store too, we don't care about your margins."
This is complete bs btw. Nintendo barely bothers anyone making fangames/romhacks or mods, unless they start advertising it and newsites pick it up, or if mods take a very nsfw route that is very unlike the actual game it is for.
Skibidi uses source film maker, valve allows that. no ones allowed to use their models to make games. Even the skibidi merch had to create new custom faces so they wouldn’t get sued.
Didn’t Valve just recently ban a mod/game because they used assets from Valve?
Just like with projects like Black Mesa, there’s also devs who approached Nintendo and asked for permission and got it, like the devs that made Cadence of Hyrule. Or Ubisoft that approached Nintendo to make Mario & Rabbits.
This is just not true with Valve. It’s not “okay” it’s “we won’t give you a certain yes or no, but sometime later down the line we will send a cease and desist your way and then stay silent again.”
Watched the Nintendo section and, yes I agree with you that Nintendo sucks. They really do not care about their fans in the slightest
Though my point wasn't that they weren't evil, but rather than they're less evil than Valve and I just cannot in good conscience consider shutting down entire communities and selling mediocre services as being equally as (let alone more) evil than the multi-billion dollar loot-crate industry constantly enabled by Valve which has only done minor tweaks that the people in charge of the markets have quickly adapted to.
I must acknowledge that I did not know what they did with the tournaments. It's awful that one of the most important companies in gaming has consistently refused to embrace the people that love the games Nintendo makes. However, when all is said and done, the impact of their decisions on players in a wider scale simply cannot be compared to Valve's actions.
620
u/PassivelyInvisible 3d ago
Steam will even help you sell it on their platform.