As the title suggests, I want to discuss three titles to help open up the discussion. Pokemon Uranium, AM2R, and Project M. I’m focusing more on strict sales for this post, not the legal side (Ik they are in the full legal right to do as they please).
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**AM2R was released on the 6th of August, 2016.** A few days after its release, it was shut down as a result of DMCA takedowns by Nintendo. According to a Metroid fandom site ([https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Metroid#cite_note-9](https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Metroid#cite_note-9), has links to sales figures, some don’t seem to work, so feel free to find better sources), Nintendo’s own remake, Metroid: Samus Returns (MSR), sold half a million copies, which even for Metroid is quite low. Now, out of the three games, the removal of AM2R seems the most justifiable as Metroid isn’t worth nearly as much as pokemon and smash, so a popular fan game could affect sales.
I would first argue that the reason for the poor sales figures is a result of Metroid Prime: Federation Force (MPFF), which did poorly in the reviews and terrible in the sales. MPFF sold around 150,000 copies and received several reviews from sites like IGN, Destructoid, GameSpot, and Polygon, all with under 6/10, which is really low for those sites. Generally, this is considered by fans to be the “bad” one. Even though MSR is nothing like MPFF, as both titles are on the 3DS, I imagine MPFF would have affected the sales of any future title, regardless of quality.
I understand the reasoning to get rid of AM2R. Both a fan and a triple-A company were making the same game conceptually; both games are remakes of the same game from the ’90s. However, while MSR released a year after the DMCA takedowns, MPFF released only a couple of weeks later, in August. Considering MPFF is a part of the Metroid Prime series, you would think that unless the game was an unplayable buggy mess, it would garner more success than it did. But with the cancellation of AM2R, fans voiced their frustrations, which could have affected sales. Then again, MPFF released after Other M, which has its own controversy, so MPFF might have been doomed from the start. What I’m arguing is that while I can still see a justification, overall, I feel as if AM2R should have just been left alone.
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**Pokemon Uranium (PU) was also released in August 2016.** A month later, the devs stopped development due to Nintendo’s DMCA takedown letters. According to a pokemon fandom site ([https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon#cite_note-3DS_best-17](https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon#cite_note-3DS_best-17), has links to official Nintendo sales figures), the previous mainline pokemon game, X & Y, released in 2013 and now totals 16.53 million sales. Pokemon Sun & Moon (S & M) released shortly after the DMCA takedown in November of 2016, which now totals 16.25 sales, a quarter of a million less than X & Y. Both of these sales figures are from March 2021.
So it’s pretty clear why Nintendo shut the game down. They had a new release and didn’t want the fan game affecting sales. But how many sales were affected? PU was free, which certainly helped with the 1.5 million downloads before the DMCA. But because Nintendo can’t stop the people who already downloaded the game, if they made the right business decision, surely those 1.5 million would have had a bigger effect on the sales. Not to say that a quarter of a million sales isn’t huge, but how many of those lost sales are directly linked to PU?
TemTem was also heavily inspired by pokemon. They just avoided all the legal problems. They sold half a million digital copies within the first month and are still in early access. Until a full release is made, we can’t say anything definitive. However, it is worth noting that TemTem was first released in January of 2020, after the release of Sword and Shield (S & S) in November of 2019.
In July of 2020, S & S release its first DLC pack, which according to Nintendo Life, moved S & S from 15th in the UK sales charts to top ten, with a “very significant 51% increase in sales week-on-week” ([https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/06/pokemon_sword_and_shield_dlc_causes_notable_spike_in_base_game_sales_uk](https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/06/pokemon_sword_and_shield_dlc_causes_notable_spike_in_base_game_sales_uk)). Something similar happened during the 2016 sale of S & M. In 2017, Nintendo release Ultra S & M which now totals 8.98 million sales, again, as of March 2021.
What’s important about all these numbers is that there doesn’t seem to be a trend of people wanting pokemon fan/inspired games OVER the official Nintendo approved games. There are a variety of reasons this could be the case. How many people love pokemon so much that they get both fan and official games? How many people are unaware of the pc games or unwilling to buy a pc for TemTem, considering Nintendo marketing more for kids? How many people had no interest in getting pokemon and only tried PU because it was free? There’s no denying that these games must have affected the sales in some regard. However, PU didn’t seem to affect the sales of S & M at large.
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**Super Smash Bros Brawl (Brawl) was released in January 2008.** Project M (PM) was a mod for Brawl, released in February of 2011. Brawl, up to this point, was doing fantastic in sales according to a 2009 article by Games Industry, which says within the opening year that Brawl’s sales amount to over 4 million copies ([https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/nintendo-games-dominate-software-sales-in-us](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/nintendo-games-dominate-software-sales-in-us)), not to mention the 13 million as of March 2021, ([https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/software/wii.html](https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/software/wii.html)). No matter what Project M could do, Brawl was already a success.
What’s important to keep in mind when discussing PM is that there were no official takedown notices. The most we have is some behind the scenes info. But we are fully aware that lawyers were involved and were ready to act if the PM devs didn’t shut down development. And again, I can see the justification, especially considering that Nintendo didn’t own all the assets (Sonic, Snake, trophies, etc.), so trying to accept the mod, or even ignore it, is significantly harder when you have to appease multiple companies.
However, no matter how you slice it, you needed to buy a copy of Brawl to play PM. Considering what other companies have done with mods, Nintendo threatening the PM devs just lost them money. Regardless of any moral argument, you can’t deny Bethesda’s workshop supports both the developers and the big corporations. Imagine if PM became DLC. Nintendo and other companies missed out on free revenue.