Welcome to jdrgaming.com Thursday, March 28 2024 @ 10:05 AM PDT

Nintendo wields copyright hammer: damages self

In a beautiful demonstration of how not to run a company, Nintendo once again loses fans and public good will by issuing a DMCA complaint against the developers of an hours-old game, developed as part of the Ludum Dare competition.

No Mario's Sky (the title a play on the recently-released No Man's Sky and the classic Mario games), is a game about “exploration and survival in an infinite procedurally generated universe.” The main character in the game is clearly Mario of the Nintendo games. This was enough to wake up the lawyers at Nintendo, and they did what comes naturally to people locked in their dark, nasty little copyright-is-all reality, issuing the DMCA complaint and warning the developers to cease and desist.

But the people behind No Mario's Sky, a group called ASMB, were clearly ready for this move; they immediately changed the game's main character, and re-released the game as DMCA's Sky (hee hee). They also withdrew the game from the Ludum Dare competition.

Let's look at the score card for this incident:

ASMB: received plenty of support and publicity, with very little effort. Had to withdraw their entry from Ludum Dare, but the extra publicity more than makes up for this.

Nintendo: had an opportunity to win fans with no actual downside (since the idea that this game could somehow dilute their brand is simply laughable). Instead, lost even more fans and the positive publicity that comes with not being a bunch of corporate dicks.