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‘Smash’ Competitive Leagues Freak Out Over Latest Nintendo Edicts

from the nintendon't dept

For nearly a decade now, we’ve discussed Nintendo’s oddly combative relationship with the eSports community, specifically as it revolves around Super Smash Bros. tournaments. Whereas other game publishers have fully embraced these tournaments and the attention they bring to their games, Nintendo does what Nintendo always does instead: exert more and more control, pissing everyone off over disputes about the most inconsequential and minute details. Sometimes this revolves around demands for licensing to put on tournaments and sometimes it’s over the use of mods in those tournaments. In every case, it sure looks like the chopping off of Nintendo’s nose to spite its face.

But this latest iteration of Nintendo’s attempts to exert an insane level of control over these third parties has a huge swath of the competitive Smash Bros. community absolutely freaking out.

Posted on October 24 on Nintendo’s UK, Japan, and North America websites, the rules set strict limits on all “community” tournaments. According to the new guidelines, in addition to being nonprofit events, Smash tournaments would also be limited to 200 participants, unable to set prizes above $5,000, unable to have sponsors, and forbidden from using modified versions of Nintendo games, like the popular “Project M” hack of Super Smash Bros. Melee. Tournament organizers wouldn’t even be allowed to sell food, beverages, or merchandise.

While the guidelines don’t ban all commercial tournaments outright, they do require the companies behind those events to get special licenses directly from Nintendo. However, the company states that it’s “up to Nintendo’s sole discretion whether or not a licensee will be granted to a corporation or organization.” Given Nintendo’s track-record, many fans are worried this will lead some of these restrictions to trickle down to bigger esports events, or make holding a Smash Bros. tournament too much of a headache to even bother with in the first place.

In what world it makes sense for Nintendo to dictate at least some of the above is entirely beyond me. The food and drinks thing is flatly obnoxious. I’m at least a little surprised that Nintendo doesn’t have a requirement for the precise color of the urinal cakes in the bathrooms.

But this is what the company does. Given the choice, Nintendo will always choose to exert the maximum amount of control over having a vibrant community of fans and others that would actually lead to more interest in its games. And, as commenters have often pointed out in posts about Nintendo, it’s survived doing all of this thus far because enough people still buy enough Nintendo products that the company never learns a lesson. And while that may happen yet again, it’s worth noting that the competitive Smash community is fully fired up over these latest dictates.

“Ah yes, it is that time of the year where Nintendo remembers to ruin the day of every Smash player,” tweeted Samuel “Dabuz” Buzby, one of the top-ranked players in the world. “Fuck Nintendo, they are like a 5 year old screaming for attention at all times when it comes to competitive Smash,” tweeted Adam “Armada” Lindgren, long considered one of the “five gods” of Smash Bros. Melee.

Juan “Hungrybox” DeBiedma, one of the other “five gods,” threatened to continue running his own tournaments until Nintendo’s lawyers reached out to him in person. “I’m running Coinbox,” he said during a recent livestream. “I’m gonna keep running it in January, I’m gonna keep running it in February, March, and April, I will run it every fucking week until I receive word from them directly. I’m not going to stop out of fear. They have to come to me directly with the document. Until then I’m calling their fucking bluff.”

Now, keep in mind with all of this that Nintendo also announced in 2022 that it was partnering with a company called Panda Global to be the officially licensed partner for Smash tournaments. That came out as part of the whole licensing chaos in that same year, with tournaments suddenly getting shut down after Nintendo said they weren’t licensed to operate. There was a backlash against Panda Global and Nintendo as a result, which led to the abandonment of the Panda Global league in its infancy, but, well, it appears the new guidelines might once again be due to that rekindled partnership.

The company was supposed to have its own Smash Bros. league organized by Panda Global. However, following a drama-filled cancellation of Video Game Boot Camp’s Smash World Tour event in 2022, many accused Nintendo and Panda Global of colluding to squash competing tournaments. An ensuing boycott of Panda’s league eventually led it to disband at the start of 2023. After Nintendo announced its new tournament guidelines today, someone allegedly leaked a Panda Global pitch deck for its Smash Bros. league, and it appeared to point toward a generous collaboration between Panda Global and Nintendo—the type of competitive circuit pros have long asked for, with sizable payments to host organizers to help with costs.

Again, control, control, control. Rather than letting a vibrant, self-emerging ecosystem of fans and players spring up all over the place in tournaments far and wide, all of which serves to generate more interest in Nintendo’s games, the company instead demands control. Tournaments will happen chiefly with its preferred partner and, outside of that, only under ridiculous restrictions that basically make hosting a tournament simply not worth the trouble.

Nintendo hates you. Or, at the very least, they don’t give a shit about you.

Filed Under: competitions, esports, fans, super smash bros., video games
Companies: nintendo

Rockstar Scoops Up Modding, Roleplay Communities In A Departure From Previous Policy

from the modding-their-behavior dept

It’s important coming into this story to know and note that Rockstar, the publisher behind hit franchises like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, has waged a very public war on modding communities for its games for years now. Despite just how useful these modding communities tend to be in elongating the sales cycle for video games, Rockstar has gone after the tools for making mods for its games, has banned players for using mods even when those mods don’t change online gameplay, has DMCA blitzed the mods themselves, and so on. It’s a very purposeful series of actions clearly based on company policy.

Company policy that is perhaps undergoing some level of change. As Rockstar prepares for the release of GTA 6, the company also scooped up a community of dedicated fans of GTA and Red Dead Redemption 2, a community which has formed around roleplaying within those games and using all kinds of mods.

The team behind the biggest Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2 role-playing communities, Cfx.re, is officially becoming part of Rockstar Games. The new partnership comes ahead of the possible launch of GTA VI in 2024, and will lead to an updated policy that officially allows the addition of mods created in the FiveM and RedM communities to the hit open-world games.

“Over the past few years, we’ve watched with excitement as Rockstar’s creative community have found new ways to expand the possibilities of Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2, particularly through the creation of dedicated roleplay servers,” Rockstar wrote in an August 11 blog post on its website. “As a way to further support those efforts, we recently expanded our policy on mods to officially include those made by the roleplay creative community.”

Despite Rockstar’s reputation on communities like this, this is really cool in a couple of different ways. The minor reversal or allowance on mods will get the headline, and it’s certainly deserving of attention. For a company like Rockstar to relinquish some small amount of control in this manner when it has been so staunchly against mods isn’t insignificant.

And perhaps it goes hand in hand with the other cool thing about all of this: Rockstar embracing a fan community that is doing new and interesting things with its titles.

In addition to allowing users to make all sorts of mods for GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2, the Cfx.re team’s FiveM and RedM clients are also the nexus for massive role-playing communities around the games who use dedicated servers to make elaborate worlds where individual players take on various roles from criminal and civilian to create a more authentic online open world experience.

“This is a huge step forward in the growth of our community, and an opportunity for us to work with Rockstar Games to advance the FiveM platform and the creative community surrounding it,” Cfx.re wrote in a statement. “While our day-to-day operations won’t have any noticeable changes, with Rockstar’s support, we are going to continue to improve our platform and we are truly excited for what this means for our users, community, and creators!”

This doesn’t mean that Rockstar has definitely done a complete one-eighty when it comes to mods and these fan communities, but it’s a start at the very least. And we should appreciate that shifting this kind of company policy in a company as large as Rockstar is a bit like turning the Titanic.

In that context, Rockstar should be encouraged to do more of this and really open things up, allowing its greatest fans to make its properties more valuable through their fandom.

Filed Under: fan communities, fan mods, fans, fivem, modding, mods, redm, role playing, video game mods, video games
Companies: rockstar

Music Streaming Services Sell Musicians Access To Their Fans; SoundCloud Goes A Better Way

from the connecting-with-fans dept

Back in January, Walled Culture wrote about an interesting initiative by the German online audio distribution platform and music sharing service SoundCloud, with its Fan-Powered Royalties (FPR) approach. At the time, we noted that it was a kind of halfway house to the true fans idea this blog has promoted many times.

We also pointed out that one of the major benefits of the FPR approach is that it provides detailed information about an artist’s true fans, which in turn allows more income to be generated from that audience segment, through targeted marketing of concerts, products and services. It seems that SoundCloud has understood this, as evidenced by its new “Fans” service, now open to some 50,000 artists, which builds on its earlier FPR move. Here’s how SoundCloud describes the idea:

The Fans product helps artists discover their most valuable fans on SoundCloud, tapping into a combination of proprietary data from Fan Powered Royalties, engagement data, and user reach. You’ll even be able to sort your most engaged fans based on indicators like comments, listening behavior, sharing habits and more.

Just knowing who your fans are isn’t always enough. That’s why we’re also allowing you to message those fans easily and directly. Say thanks, share previews of upcoming releases, sell tickets and merch, or just open up the opportunity to chat. Regardless of where you are in your career, you can bring your fans in on the journey – and let them help you succeed.

This is an encouraging development, because it turns the current streaming business model on its head. As SoundCloud rightly points out:

Streaming isn’t working for the vast majority of artists. Why? Because streaming services won’t tell you who your fans are. Instead, they run business models built on selling you access to your fans. And the streaming services aren’t alone – ticketing and merch platforms won’t tell you who your fans are, either.

Most platforms keep artists in the dark about their fans: it’s a really important point that musicians and other creators need to understand if they are to receive fair remuneration for their work, and to take back control of their creative destiny. It’s good to see SoundCloud leading the way here.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon. Originally posted to the Walled Culture blog.

Filed Under: connect with fans, fans, streaming
Companies: soundcloud

Nintendo Shuts Down Musician’s YouTube Videos Of Metroid Covers

from the nintendon't dept

Nintendo’s war on its own fans’ love of Nintendo game music continues. The company has certainly made headlines over the past few years (with a big ramp up recently) by going on DMCA and threat blitzes for YouTube videos and channels that have uploaded what are essentially just the music from various Nintendo games. The blitzes started by taking down 3-figure numbers of videos, then reached the thousands by 2022. Notably, this has pissed off tons of Nintendo fans, many of whom pointed out that Nintendo was disappearing all of this music that was almost entirely unavailable through legit means.

To continue to be clear on this point, Nintendo can do this… but it certainly doesn’t have to. Evidence for that would be much of the rest of the video game industry. You don’t hear this level of takedowns being done by all the other gaming companies out there.

But, I suppose if you squint really hard and have been inhaling gas fumes, you could argue somehow that a direct recording of Nintendo’s game music being on YouTube is some sort of threat to current or future Nintendo plans. That gets a little bit harder to use to explain why Nintendo is now also targeting people who are uploading their own recreations and covers of Nintendo music.

As first reported by NintendoLife, the newest member of the club is SynaMax, a YouTube channel dedicated to music. The user behind the channel, who says in the channel’s bio that they have been creating music since 2004, had previously uploaded high-quality recreations and covers of some Metroid Prime songs. However, that seems to have attracted the attention of Nintendo and its legal team. In a video uploaded yesterday, the channel creator claimed he was contacted by Nintendo lawyers on May 31 and told to remove nine videos that featured Metroid Prime music covers or remixes.

“I’m really disappointed in Nintendo that they would force me to take down these videos because they want compulsory licenses,” SynaMax said in the new video.

Here again, Nintendo is probably within its rights to demand these videos get taken down, though some of that depends on just how transformative these covers could be seen as being. It’s not something that generally needs considering, because most companies, again, aren’t doing these takedowns like Nintendo is. Over a decade ago, I wrote about OC ReMix, a site dedicated to hosting and promoting fan-created remakes of video game music. That site still operates today and still very much hosts remixes of Nintendo game music. Whether Nintendo will get around to going after that site too instead of just YouTube videos remains to be seen.

But the point here is that Nintendo very much doesn’t have to do this to its creative fans. And why it wants less interest generated in its products through this free promotion it’s getting past its fans.

However, they questioned why the company becomes aggressive instead of just demonetizing relevant videos and letting fans continue to produce and share Nintendo-inspired creations. SynaMax said he would not mind losing that revenue; they just want to share their songs with other fans. SynaMax, his frustration evident, wrapped by saying that they’re done making any more Nintendo-related content “for a very long time.”

And one less free promoter now exists for Nintendo. Surely SynaMax’s content wasn’t threat enough to outweigh his spreading interest in Nintendo music. But that’s Nintendo for you.

Filed Under: copyright, cover songs, covers, fans, metroid, video game music, video games
Companies: nintendo, youtube

Having True Fans Can Create A True Business

from the that's-the-point dept

We have written several times about the “true fans” idea as an alternative approach to the traditional remuneration models employed by the copyright industry players, such as publishers, recording companies and film studios. It’s a simple approach: get the people who really love an artist’s work to support it directly, and in advance, rather than indirectly through buying things after they’ve been created. If that sounds rather soft and utopian, it’s not: it can also be run as a business, as this story on Axios makes clear:

The Jonas Brothers are helping to launch a new subscription media company called Scriber that allows celebrities to charge their biggest fans for exclusive content via text messages.

Why it matters: The goal is to bring the subscription economy to Hollywood without using Big Tech platforms as intermediaries.

According to the article, the Jonas Brothers have 50 million Instagram followers in total, so if 1% of them were willing to pay the 4.99monthlysubscriptionfee,thatwouldgenerateintheregionof4.99 monthly subscription fee, that would generate in the region of 4.99monthlysubscriptionfee,thatwouldgenerateintheregionof30 million a year, less payment processing fees, which will be relatively small. Even if only 0.1% are keen, that’s still $3 million per year. According to Axios, users of the new service will receive “exclusive material — like behind-the-scenes videos, exclusive merchandise and early access to tickets — via text message links pointing to content that’s pre-loaded for extra fast browser viewing.”

What’s most interesting about the move is not any of the above details, which are specific to well-known names like the Jonas Brothers, but the fact that Scriber is designed as a general platform that can be used by any artist:

Scriber will charge all celebrity creators $1 per month for every subscriber that uses the service. Because Scriber works with celebrities on the back end of the deal, most users will not realize Scriber is powering their transactions.

It’s a great example of how the true fans model not only benefits artists and their followers, but can also be the basis of a new kind of intermediary. But it is one that takes only a relatively small cut of the money, unlike the current system sustained by copyright whereby most money ends up in the pockets of the corporates, not the creators. Expect to see many more experiments like Scriber.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon. Story originally published on Walled Culture.

Filed Under: business models, connect with fans, fans, jonas brothers, true fans
Companies: scriber

What MLB May Need To Do After It Stops Its Player Lockout Bullshit

from the you-need-the-fans dept

If you’re not a sports fan, or not an American, you may not be aware that there is currently an owner’s lockout occurring in Major League Baseball. We’ve talked a bit in the past about some of the bullshit MLB is pulling with all of this, namely its decision to strip out all references to current players from its website. But in those discussions we never really got into what this lockout is or why it’s occurring. Let me give you a quick primer.

For starters, this is not a player strike. Ownership and players are currently negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA). The owners locked the players out of MLB facilities in December, claiming it did so as a defensive measure. This simply is not true. There was nothing in the pervious CBA that required a lockout once that CBA expired. MLB could have gone on with its normal schedule this year while it continued to negotiate a new CBA. Instead, MLB has imposed artificial deadline after artificial deadline and then blamed the players for not giving in to its bad-faith negotiations. MLB recently announced that the start of the season would be delayed and the games not played would simply be lost, again blaming the players for this. That isn’t true. MLB is choosing unilaterally to cancel MLB games.

You may or may not care about any of this. Where this crosses over into Techdirt territory, however, is what is going to happen when an inevitable deal is reached and games resume. Why? Well, if the last prolonged work stoppage in MLB is any indication, teams will likely resume play with diminished attendance in the stands and viewership numbers down for teams across the board. Baseball fans will be very, very angry about all of this and the reprecussions of the lockout have the potential to be felt for years.

So what should MLB prepare to do to claw back as many of those fans as possible once games resume? Many of the things that it should have been doing to grow the game all along, except that this time they might have not choice:

Noticing a theme? MLB appears to really enjoy battling with everyone and everything, especially on the internet. This stands in stark contrast to what the other professional leagues are doing. Hell, MLB doesn’t seem to understand that my Twitter timeline is overflowing with amazing NFL and NBA clips from games, all by fans out in the wild and all of them driving my and others’ interests in these games. That’s what gets you to turn on the television or buy a ticket these days.

And MLB is going to need to do something to claw back fans when this all ends. Because the public in general knows this is an ownership lockout and are most certainly not blaming the players for this.

Filed Under: baseball, blackout rules, fair use, fans, lockout
Companies: mlb

Olive Garden At It Again Enforcing Its IP Instead Of Letting Anyone Have Some Fun With Joke NFTs

from the wyhyf dept

You all know about Olive Garden. It’s the chain of… oh, let’s just play along and call them Italian restaurants that have unlimited breadsticks and names of supposedly Italian offerings that appear to have gotten their names by inputting a bunch of Italian food words into a dilapidated AI program that combines them into a series of unholy dish-names. Sure, there’s “Shrimp Scampi”, but there is also “Five Cheese Ziti Al Forno” and “Lasagna Fritta”. I kid of course, but the chain and its parent company, Darden, have also found their way onto Techdirt in the past by being overly aggressive when it comes to trademark enforcement. For instance, Darden attempted to shut down the site allofgarden.com, which was dedicated to tongue in cheek reviews of the chain’s dishes. Darden later apologized for that, blaming some kind of legal bot that crawls for potential trademark infringements on the brand.

We’ll have to see if something similar happens here, as Darden is now going after a site that jokingly sells NFTs to “own” individual Olive Garden locations and/or simply get NFT tokens for free unlimited breadsticks. The site, nonfungibleolivegardens.com has actually sold out of individual locations, but points to a secondary market. The breadstick tokens are, as are their real life counterparts, free and unlimited. Olive Garden’s imagery and name appear all over the site, naturally, and the site’s Twitter account confirmed that the site’s host, OpenSea, had received a takedown demand (the recipients incorrectly call it a “DMCA” takedown, even though it’s about trademarks).

Now, again, Darden IP appears all over those pages. That being said, the site has general language and a specific Q&A on its home page that makes it abundantly clear that it is not affiliated with the real life Olive Garden in any way. This is all one giant joke, in other words, albeit one where some measure of real money is changing hands. It’s also built to be a place for Olive Garden enthusiasts to express that enthusiasm. From the homepage:

For too long, ownership of Olive Garden franchises has been dominated by the capricious whims of the fiat system. That’s why we’re enabling anyone to trustlessly mint a nonfungible token representing 1 of 880 real Olive Garden franchises in the United States.

Our goal is to bootstrap a community of Olive Garden enthusiasts, which is why the franchise mint price is tethered to the reasonable cost of a Tour Of Italy entree ($19.99, as of Dec 20, 2021).

And later, in the Q&A:

Is this affiliated with Olive Garden?

No. We are simply a community of Olive Garden fans invested in both trustless future economies and delicious, reasonably-priced Italian fare.

Hell, the entire “business plan roadmap” the site lays out involves plans for celebrity influencers, “Layer 2 on-chain curbside pickup”, and the eventual buyout of Olive Garden from Darden. The whole thing is done for funsies. Which means that the Darden folks could figure out a way to get involved with the fun, instead of trying to stamp it out. Whether they will or not remains to be seen.

But NFGO certainly isn’t backing down. In addition to the response letter the site sent, which you can see in the embedded/linked tweet above, they’ve also come out with two new NFT tokens. Those would be for — you guessed it — the takedown notice they received and that response letter.

Because when you’re here, you’re hilarious.

Filed Under: enthusiasm, fans, nfts, olive garden, takedown, trademark
Companies: darden restaurants, olive garden

Parody Post About Sega Suing Its Fans Perfectly Lampoons Nintendo

from the slow-clap dept

We have long chronicled the aggressive IP enforcement tactics and behavior of video game giant Nintendo. There have been so many stories specifically about Nintendo’s animosity towards its fans when those fans express their fandom by creating fan-games that any regular reader here will be familiar with at least some of them. While gaming company responses towards fan-games are certainly more of a spectrum than something black and white, Nintendo probably takes the crown for the least permissive gaming company for this sort of thing. So much so, in fact, that we highlighted its former chief rival, Sega, when it took the opposite tact with folks making Sonic the Hedgehog fan-games.

Well, someone out there took the time to create a parody news article about Sega doing a heel-turn on this in a way that seems mostly dedicated to skewering Nintendo for its aggressive, anti-fan behavior. The headline for the comedy post is, appropriately, “Sega Announces They Will Be Using Fan-Game Creators To Develop New Sonic Lawsuit.”

Let’s dive in.

Sega announced today that, after a down-period of creativity in its staple Sonic franchise, the company will be reaching out to fan game developers to create new and exciting lawsuits.

“For years, people have said that Sega’s Sonic games lack that magic from the original games, while fan games have become impressive standalone titles,” said Sonic team leader Takashi Iizuka. “We worked with fans to make Sonic Mania and then everybody was all like ‘oh I guess the fans are better than Sega at making their own game,’ so now we’re switching up the strategy, because fuck you guys. From now on, we have to go full Nintendo and sue these fuckers for every single penny they’ve got. These people have spent their own time and money creating beautiful, loving tributes to Sonic games, and they thought they could just get away with it. Sonic Team is honored to take these longtime fans, some of them even just kids, and drag them kicking and screaming behind bars where they belong.”

“Go full Nintendo.” Sega and Nintendo have taken starkly different paths interacting with their most dedicated fans and this fictional post is essentially poking fun at the latter by satirizing what it would look like if Sega got aggressive. More to the point, it does a useful job of pointing out, given that all of this is not true and done for comedic purposes, that Nintendo could exert less control and allow its fans to express themselves if it wanted to. If Sega can do it, so can Nintendo.

But Nintendo doesn’t want to do this. It values strict IP control over everything else, even as many argue doing so is against its own monetary interests.

Go to the link for one fun fictional comment from a Sega fan being put into the back of a squad car, but I couldn’t let this post be written without including the final paragraph from the post, because it’s just so, so good.

Despite the lawsuit, Sega admitted they were incredibly thankful for the fan designer’s unique, exciting ideas for Sonic games that they could completely ignore for the next decade. They then announced their new game Werewolf Sonic 2: Sorry, Fuckers will be arriving in 2023.

While this is all quite funny, it’s also frustrating trying to understand why in the world Nintendo is willing to endure being the butt of these particular jokes, not to mention the negative aspects of its reputation, just because it wants to squash its own fanbase. In nearly all cases, the company gains nothing and loses at least some measure of goodwill and respect. Put another way, if you took this parody article and replaced every reference to Sega with Nintendo, it wouldn’t be that far off from reality.

Why a beloved gaming company wants that for itself is an open question.

Filed Under: fans, ip, ip enforcement, lawsuits, parody
Companies: nintendo, sega

from the let-your-fans-market-for-you dept

A little while back, the Guardian covered the rising literary power of BookTok – short videos on TikTok devoted to the pleasures and pains of reading. As well as plenty of background information about the BookTok phenomenon, it has the following perceptive comment from Kat McKenna, a marketing and brand consultant specializing in children’s and young adult books:

“These ‘snapshot’ visual trailers are making books cinematic in a way that publishers have been trying to do with marketing book trailers for a really long time. But the way TikTok users are creating imagery inspired by what they are reading is so simple, and so clever. It’s that thing of bringing the pages to life, showing what you get from a book beyond words.”

Attracting new – and especially new young – readers is something that publishers have long been striving for. And now, free of charge, BookTok creators are doing this for them, driving huge sales in many cases, as the Guardian explained:

Adam Silvera’s 2017 novel They Both Die at the End is one of the books to have benefited from the BookTok effect. Users recently started filming themselves before and after reading the book, sobbing as they reached the finish line. In March, it shot to the top of the teen fiction charts, selling more than 4,000 copies a week. The book has sold more than 200,000 copies in the UK, with well over half of those coming belatedly in 2021, after thousands of posts about it (#adamsilvera has been viewed 10.8m times).

BookTok is a wonderful demonstration of the power of user-generated content. Because it is made by ordinary people for ordinary people, it speaks directly in a way that no slick marketing campaign can hope to match. But inevitably, hanging over all such exciting experiments with the digital medium there will be “copyright anxiety” – a fear that during your explorations you might cross some invisible line that means you are breaking the law.

Think how many more sales of books, music, art, and films could be driven by new kinds of BookTok, appearing on multiple platforms, if only copyright allowed this kind of material to be used without the risk of legal threats, or of accounts being blocked. Ironically, it turns out that companies demanding stringent enforcement of copyright’s unreasonable rules are ultimately harming themselves.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Originally posted to the Walled Culture blog.

Filed Under: advertising, booktok, copyright, culture, fans
Companies: tiktok

Huge GTA4 Mod Started In 2014 Shuts Down Due To 'Hostility' From Take-Two Interactive

from the mod-squad dept

For some reason, it seems that there is an industry issue heating up among video game developers and publishers over their modding communities. We’ve begun to see a flurry of stories on the topic lately and perhaps the most impressive thing about those stories is how wildly binary they are. Nintendo tends to Nintendo, for instance, where control is valued over building a community of fans. Other publishers, like CD Projekt Red and Bethesda go the completely opposite direction and not only embrace the modding communities for their games, but also sometimes simply hire talented modders directly to their payroll.

Take-Two Interactive, the publishers of the Grand Theft Auto franchise and the subject of this post, has a history of bullying ambitious modders into shutting down. The company has recently put this practice into overdrive, going after all kinds of modding teams working on current and past GTA games, with the speculation being that it’s all being done because of a forthcoming remaster of some of those older games.

Well, the hostility has gotten bad enough that some fan-run projects are simply shutting down before the legal threats start flying. That appears to be the case with an incredibly ambitious mod for GTA: San Andreas.

As a result of this hostility, GTA Underground lead developer dkluin wrote in a post yesterday on the GTAForums that they and the other modders working on the project were now “officially ceasing the development” of GTA: Underground.

“Due to the increasing hostility towards the modding community and imminent danger to our mental and financial well-being,” explained dkluin, “We sadly announce that we are officially ceasing the development of GTA: Underground and will be shortly taking all official uploads offline.”

The mod had aimed at putting all the historical cities from GTA games on a single map, while also developing new home-grown cities for people to play in. Work on it began in 2014, when dkluin was a teenager. As is so often the case with this sort of thing, this was a labor of love by a modder and a community that clearly love the GTA games. But, with Take-Two again set to release a bunch of GTA remasters sometime in the future, the lawyers have been sic’d on all kinds of mods.

In its fair well video by dkluin, where they announce the end of development and then thank all who contributed to it, the comments were almost universally negative towards Take-Two. Examples include:

It goes on from there, with hundreds of comments. Now replicate this anger across all the different mods that were developed or in development for a game that came out nearly 20 years ago. All of that very real anger felt by very real fans of GTA and all directed towards Take-Two is going to have some impact on the public’s willingness to keep buying Take-Two games.

Apparently the company is betting that such anger is not enough to outweigh the profits gained by remastering old GTA games and exerting strict control. I have my doubts that this was the best route for Take-Two to go.

Filed Under: fans, grand theft auto, gta4, mods, video games
Companies: take two interactive