Nintendo is shedding its veneer of kindness and embracing a new reputation: Vigorous legal bully

Gaming IndustryNintendo is shedding its veneer of kindness and embracing a new reputation: Vigorous legal bullyWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Nintendo)

Art of Link in Tears of the Kingdom

We’re experiencing a golden age of Nintendo…’s legal bloodhounds. Seriously, these days I hear more about Nintendo’s latest target of annihilation than Nintendo’s latest videogames. That’s partly because the console giant’s recent output has mostly been a forgettable roster of late-generation call-ups like “a Zelda spinoff” and “more Mario Party”, but it’s also because Nintendo’s public persona has gotten pretty ugly.

Beyond that one month that we were all really into Tears of the Kingdom, the story of Nintendo lately is one of picking fights or (more commonly) threatening to sue its own fans so hard that they don’t even dare fight back. The decimation of the Ryujinx emulator and a potentially risky Palworld lawsuit are making headlines everywhere, but taking stock of just the past couple of years revealed a bunch of Nintendo legal actions that I totally forgot about.

Between late2022and2024, Nintendo:

It’s worth saying out loud that this is not normal, even for videogame company standards. Hostility toward fan gamesisn’t unique to Nintendo(though it is easily the most hostile), but you don’t see Microsoft wiping Xbox emulators off the net, and it’d be pretty weird for EA to go after a software dev because they downloaded some box art. Sega and Sony, two companies with a rich backlog of IP and console hardware, aren’t sending cease and desist letters to ISO sites, and they’re generally more chill about fan projects, too (though the Sega-owned Atlusloves go after fansalmost as much as Nintendo). Earlier this year, the developers of the Bloodborne Kart fan game wasable to releaseitsFromSoftware-inspired kart racer after scrubbing it of official Bloodborne branding.

(Image credit: Nintendo)

Mario from Super Mario 64 gets a star, flashing the peace sign.

Nintendo’s war

In a time when we’re used to viewing game companies as adversaries—"[insert company here] isn’t your friend" is a common social media refrain—Nintendo’s heel turn has been a slower burn. It’s been true as long as I’ve followed games that people just aren’tnormalabout Nintendo. The company has always enjoyed this special, Disney-like reputation as a game maker that puts fun first and breeds creativity. Those qualities have cultivated a fandom fiercer than any other entertainment brand on earth, and insulate the billion-dollar operation from cynicism.

Perhaps it’s that Disney-like trajectory fueling Nintendo’s latest litigious surge against any and all perceived infringers. After all, Nintendo ain’t a game company anymore—with a billion-dollar Mario movie under its belt, a sequel on the docket, theme parks, and a Zelda film on the way, the company’s value is increasingly tethered to its icons, and decreasingly associated with brand new characters or worlds. When your game plan revolves aroundrepackaging decades-old stories, everything starts to look like a threat..

Nintendo’s situation is unique because nobody hates emulation quite like Nintendo. To the Big N, there is no game preservation debate: emulation leads to piracy, so emulators are as good as pirates. Mario in Garry’s Mod is a crime. Fan games are an assault on the IP vault.

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Nintendo is Taking Down My Videos - YouTubeWatch On

Nintendo is Taking Down My Videos - YouTube

Nobody hates emulation quite like Nintendo.

It’s not like Nintendo’s legal exploits are gonna trigger a mass fan exodus, but I’d argue we’re seeing the effects of its reputation in how people are talking about the Palworld lawsuit: In one corner are Nintendo diehards cheering for the downfall of a too-familiar creature collector, in the other a mix of Palworld players and Nintendo skeptics who see this as just another example of Nintendo overreach—its latest attack on PC gaming. Even if it emerges victorious, Nintendo will come out the other side having chipped another little piece of its “lovable toymaker” mask.

And if Nintendo is going to keep going full Ace Attorney on emulators, drawing larger borders around its precious IP in the process, it shouldn’t be tedious-to-impossible to access so much of its precious back catalog legally. With the Wii Virtual Console, 3DS, and Wii U stores gone forever, the only official way to emulate an old Zelda is to buy Nintendo’s crappy online subscription and wait for that service to die in a decade, too. The Switch 2 is an opportunity to do better—to put as much focus on how fanscanplay its games as it’s currently putting on how they can’t.

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Nintendo’s war#

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals#

Nintendo’s war

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals