Nintendo’s Pretty Sure They’ll Get Away With It
Nintendo’s had a tumultuous relationship with plenty of vocal fans for years, due to their nature as a company that demands complete control over their properties and will not tolerate when any person or group uses them in a way they don’t like. As the owner of their properties, they’re within their rights to take down anything they feel infringes on them. But companies rarely do so because they value relationships with their fanbase and the intention to establish and maintain goodwill. Not Nintendo, though, which has made a habit out of letting loose with cease-and-desist letters whenever they feel like it. That’s the Nintendo Difference, and it speaks to the quality of their products that they still have a loyal fanbase despite this.
This is all normal for Nintendo. Yet, they’ve never gone after so many fanbases in such a short time like they’ve done in the last week. This is a company that can continue these practices because they know they’ll get away with it.
The fun actually started a few weeks ago, when Nintendo stopped The Big House from holding their annual Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament. Nintendo wasn’t against the competition happening per se, but the act of assembling the tournament was complicated this year thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic. As a workaround, the players planned to use a version of Melee modded with rollback netcode known as “Slippi.” The mod was a step too far for Nintendo, who sent the organizers a dreaded cease-and-desist letter preventing them from using the version, cancelling the tournament. Nintendo gets vicious when they catch word that fans are using modded versions of games for events that involve money, though using a better netcode than Super Smash Bros. Ultimate’s dismal one might have been part of this too.
It feels like cancelling that tournament gave them a high, because they’ve been on one since then. The fun continued this weekend when a livestream for the Splatoon 2 North America Open was cancelled one day before it was planned to air. The official explanation was “unexpected executional challenges” according to the tournament Discord, but this just happened to occur after teams entered the tournament referencing #freemelee, the movement that manifested following the aforementioned Big House tournament cancellation. Nintendo has yet to comment further, and likely won’t.
There was also a kerfuffle over a creator selling JoyCons that serve as a tribute to Desmond “Etika” Amofah, a popular streamer who loved Nintendo who sadly committed suicide in June 2019, called “Etikons.” It was initially reported that Nintendo put a complete stop to these, presumably due to not wanting an ardent fan to profit off JoyCon sales. That’s not quite it. They didn’t stop Alex “Cptn_Alex” Blake from selling the overall controllers, after modifying the designs a bit. Etika fans are glad he’s still selling the controllers, but other Nintendo fans are justifiably concerned that Cptn_Alex is potentially profiting off Etika’s memory and weaponizing his fanbase against those who disagree — including Etika’s family. This is a minor example compared to the others.
https://twitter.com/GilvaSunner/status/1336246347423494144
Not content with the weekend fun, they’re also going after music on YouTube. Music uploader GilvaSunner noted that the soundtracks for Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Mario Kart Wii have been blocked. This is another case where Nintendo is within their rights to take down content, but it’s not as if the soundtracks for these games are easily available to purchase. This is hardly the first time they’ve done this with GilvaSunner, and it won’t be the last.
Some Nintendo fans are making a lot of noise about their bad PR moves, many within the replies to every tweet the company makes. None of this will affect the company’s bottom line. Nintendo nonetheless demands a loyal base of players who don’t pay attention to everything that happens online, or enjoy their games so much that they couldn’t possibly boycott them. As long as the company suffers no financial repercussions, they’ll keep behaving as they are.
There are only two ways this could stop. The first will involve Nintendo pissing off so many fans that they’ll actually feel the pecuniary hurt from it, which they might reach if they keep this behavior up. The second is if they start releasing a stream of disappointing games, and will have to depend on the very fans they pissed off to sustain them through an unlucky period. Neither of these scenarios are likely to happen in the near future, again showing why Nintendo knows they’ll escape this unscathed.
With their newfound pattern, it’s only a matter of time before Nintendo stomps on another fan project or event — perhaps even before or immediately after I make this post. They have a lot of power to enforce how their properties are used, and wave it around far more than any other company. When nothing happens to them, why would they stop now?
About The Author
Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
