Discuss and Debate: Fan-games and Their Morality

[Commander]

Also known as the I'm going to regret this topic.

 

So after watching a "Prove me Wrong" video, I kind of got to thinking about Pokemon Reborn and I'm actually not quite sure people really understand the concepts and ideas around fan-games. Unlike in those videos, this kind of topic really has no right or wrong answer and honestly the debate and discussion is kind of split across the web on the idea. We're not here to discuss whether or not fan-games are legal (which they aren't) but whether or not it is a morally good or morally bad thing to do. Things can be illegal and still the right thing to do, but I don't want to throw any bias or skew opinions right away. Since I already know that this is going to turn into a big disaster and get locked right away, I'll lay down some ground rules:

 

1. You MUST be respectful of other users and their opinions.

2. Do not post something with the purpose of egging or trolling users to comment back

3. While you are allowed to state your opinion or thoughts without it, you must provide facts when refuting or rebutting.

4. Try to keep the discussion within the scope of the topic

 

If this lasts less than two days before being in a forced lockdown, I won't be surprised. Since this is an experiment, I am going to keep it open for two weeks (also a follow-up to my one COGA) before I lock it myself. Don't be intimidated by the rules as it's mostly to help keep emotions in check. Now it may seem odd, but I do not want to be the one starting the discussion and will hop in after a couple responses or so. I don't feel it's right for me to start as I'd likely skew opinions. Since we are in a community centered around a fan-game, I shall at least take the stance of "fan-games are immoral" which funny enough I guess you could say I'm also siding with "Nintendo is doing a good service shutting them down." (None of you have to choose a side, but I am for educational purposes).

[PokeFailure]

Nintendo makes literal billions(Give or take) from the Pokemon franchise every year so I think it's fine from a morality standpoint to make a free fun fan project that hurts no one(or Nintendo financially) by existing.

 

 

[Candy]

This majorly depends on your moral compass - what you consider morally good. In my case, my moral compass is roughly (for I didn't think about this as much as I'd like to) defined as follows: good means improvement of any sort, which does not interfere with the objectives of others around you. Therefore, many things lie in the grey area by my definition of good, such as science, religion, immigration, etc. For those things, I'd have to weight the pros and cons of each, and see if the pros outweigh the cons and vice versa. Fortunately, I don't think such extensive analysis isn't required for fan games.

I don't consider video games in general to "improve" something, and since fan games in particular might interfere with game companies' objective to make money, I conclude that fan games are bad under my moral compass.

Let me elaborate on the first part of this sentence. I believe video games are a medium of storytelling and a method of entertainment. For some forms of storytelling, I'd argue there is improvement of the mind associated with it, because you might learn new things. However, pokemon games (both canon and fan games) usually lack content to learn (or at least that's what I think) because the focus is on strengthening one's pokemon rather than following the story closely or getting something out of the story. Sure, Reborn's story is intriguing, but things that happen to the characters I already learned from either experience or from prior learning. Thus, it's entertainment but not improvement.

Perhaps an ideal world would be for fan games not to exist and instead have those fan game developers create their own gaming companies, but alas, that is not a world we exist in. Things that are as morally bad as making fan games are done (piracy, plagiarism, etc), and the world still keeps spinning. Given, though, that we will die at some point and there isn't much reason to stick to morals unless you believe in some variation of Heaven/Hell, I'd say that one should f*ck morals if the present enjoyment surpass the consequences of f*cking them. In fan games' case, the game company doesn't do anything unless you refuse to take your game off the internet when they ask you to, which I'd say isn't much of a consequence tbh

[Commander]

I'm actually going to flip the situation @PokeFailure mentioned as it is a good discussion point I think should be addressed. Let's change the situation a little bit: Let's say the Pokemon Company (TPC) is a very small, niche company that's just barely getting by with every game. Does this "hurt no one" suddenly become an issue or is it the exact same as if they were a big company with a lot of resources and money?

 

(Not jumping in yet, but I did want to bring that up)

[Candy]

15 minutes ago, Commander said:

I'm actually going to flip the situation @PokeFailure mentioned as it is a good discussion point I think should be addressed. Let's change the situation a little bit: Let's say the Pokemon Company (TPC) is a very small, niche company that's just barely getting by with every game. Does this "hurt no one" suddenly become an issue or is it the exact same as if they were a big company with a lot of resources and money?

 

(Not jumping in yet, but I did want to bring that up)

I don't think it matters whether the company is big or smol, because in either case fan games are steering away those who would pay for video games if there weren't free alternatives. On the other hand, fan games might help keep the community alive while no new games are in the market yet, but I don't know how much of an impact that has on the overall sales. Just my two cents.

[Dragoknight]

Hmmmm, interesting topic....

Well I kinda come from the "if it isn't hurting anybody, I'm okay with it" moral spectrum, and when it comes to fan games, I find that if anything, fan games will attract much more attention to a franchise than will draw away from it.

 

Yes it could steer away a small base that would rather just play the free alternative, but really, so many more will come to the existing fan base, and in general, fan games would just add to the existing hype of a community the same way any fanart does.

 

I'd actually make the argument that fan games should be protected as a form of expression.

either that or take down all the Overwatch porn that exists

42 minutes ago, Commander said:

I'm actually going to flip the situation @PokeFailure mentioned as it is a good discussion point I think should be addressed. Let's change the situation a little bit: Let's say the Pokemon Company (TPC) is a very small, niche company that's just barely getting by with every game. Does this "hurt no one" suddenly become an issue or is it the exact same as if they were a big company with a lot of resources and money?

 

(Not jumping in yet, but I did want to bring that up)

I don't really think that matters here. I mean, sure, I suppose you could feel better in affecting a billion dollar industry rather than a smaller one or vice versa, but I feel that it's kinda irrelevant to the issue at hand.

[DarkMaster]

I agree with @Dragoknight in that fan games should be protected. In the way I view fan games, these are peoples' stories. Stories that they've put blood, sweat, and tears into making. They're pretty much the same thing as fan fiction, with the only difference is that you can play fan games. I mean, take a look at my fan game, Moonlight. It originally started as a fan fiction, but I kept dropping it because I couldn't find the right way to write it. When I thought of the idea of making it into a fan game, I downloaded Essentials and started working on it. (Already had RPG Maker XP at the time.) The flow of writing felt much different with how much you're working on, but it also felt better because I could more easily describe and show what was going on. There are times where I can, and will, work on Moonlight all day and not get tired of working, where as with fan fiction I sometimes get bored when writing because I don't know how to describe a fight scene or show the emotion that you feel when something bad happens. Really, all fan games are are a form of storytelling, and no one's changing my opinion on this.

[wcv]

2 hours ago, Commander said:

Let's say the Pokemon Company (TPC) is a very small, niche company that's just barely getting by with every game.

I kinda think in that instance there wouldn't be enough of an audience to really attract much in the way of fangames.

 

But setting that aside, in such a circumstance if fangames attracted enough of a crowd away from that company's games to significantly impact their earnings, then that honestly just sounds like the inevitable happening. They would have likely faltered rapidly anyway if a significant portion of the audience stopped buying their games in order to play a game released by one person. Whether that be to a fan-game, or to a bigger studio on more solid footing that sees the success and moves in, the same result would have happened.

 

The opposite is therefore more important to consider. Perhaps people interested in games look at the fangame and are interested in trying out the official version, boosting sales. Now you can say that isn't likely, and you could be correct. However, if you are correct, then at worst what's happened is nothing. At best the company is on a more solid footing going forward and can release better games, increasing their staying power long-term.

 

So as I see the three possibilities would be:

 

1. A significant portion of the audience leaves to play the free game, which is merely accelerating the inevitable if it happens.

2. Nothing, the fans play both because they love the games and want to support the people who make the official products).

3. There's a boost in interest as people try the free fan-game, like it, and try the actual games as well.

 

(There's technically a fourth possibility where people try the fan-game, hate it, and don't try the actual game, but in such a case they likely wouldn't have played the official game regardless, so I'm counting it under nothing).

 

For the broader question, sorta the same logic applies. Only with more dismissal of corporations and irritation with their rank hypocrisy on the topic.

 

So at worst, morally neutral.

[Wolfox]

Fangames are morally wrong. The main way I believe this is the case is the simple notion of "Why buy a console and a game at full price when there's a free form of that game for PC, albeit slightly different." There is a chance that a fan-game will impact sales, that chance existing, no matter how small it may seem, is already a big part of why. The second part comes from using the name of something to create your own thing. The way Nintendo handles them may not be 100% correct on a moral point of view either, but legally it's 100% the best thing to do. Take for example AM2R and that whole thing. The game was released fully functional and the creator got a DMCA. As little as it did, this did affect the sales of Samus Returns. There were people boycotting a game they would have loved just because Nintendo did the legally correct thing. Even more, AM2R would have been a direct competitor to SR due to both of them reliving Metroid 2. Closing statement: Fan-games are a wonderful thing, but that can't save them from technically being morally wrong.

[Commander]

Alright so that question I asked in a way could be considered a trick question (in my eyes) and some of you got that answer kind of close to mine but it doesn't seem the majority really, really understand the why behind it. You're going to learn a little bit about marketing, but I believe the answer to that question is no for the most part. The amount of revenue a company makes on average and their size should usually have minimal effects or negative effects. The gaming industry is a little finicky thing and uses something to what I would call brand recognition. If people do good work on a game, fans will pick up on the name of the company and start following them. I'm sure most of you recognize Developers like TPC, EA, and Activision. And as much as you may dislike certain ones, you can at least trust that what they sell is safe and not malicious at all (many Chinese games and applications contain malware and spyware).

 

One may argue that more often than not it could help save the company barely making it by as most hacking and modding communities are very niche often bringing more good than harm. In fact, a lot of smaller companies usually are very supportive of it despite heavy legality terms (which I've seen some give the okay for spin-offs even). The quality also usually inferior to the original product or what the devs make so it's pretty easy to recognize it's not from them but a passion project. Sonic Mania is one of the most well known projects, but when you dive deeper you'll kind of learn smaller companies and publishers are quite lenient but also many of the fans are as well and will take steps out of respect including removing things to help localization. It's a lot deeper than this, but it's a nice thing to get into once you look beyond the casual games.

 

I do want to step a little bit into profits for a moment as well. We know about piracy and you may think that it'd hurt sales. You'd honestly be surprised that it doesn't at all. You see the thing about piracy (I do not promote btw) is that most people who use it wouldn't buy the games normally and most people who are a fan do buy those games. I know there's the "I'm too poor to buy these games so my only option is to download games" is bullsh*t. That's saying you can't afford to spend $20, $10, or even sometimes $1.00 to support a company. In fact, you will have a hard time finding evidence to support piracy hurts video game sales. Just want to debunk the idea that something being free automatically affects sales figures. That stats don't lie.

 

***

 

You'd think diffusing my biggest bombshell would be bad for me, but...we aren't talking about piracy here.

 

8 minutes ago, wcv said:

I kinda think in that instance there wouldn't be enough of an audience to really attract much in the way of fangames.

Not necessarily true, but we don't necessarily call it fan-games. Could be other forms of media and such as fan-fiction written works, songs, or a dance if you really want it. It's more the game radiates with people than the budget or size of a company (*cough* Undertale *cough*).

 

2 hours ago, Candy said:

Let me elaborate on the first part of this sentence. I believe video games are a medium of storytelling and a method of entertainment. For some forms of storytelling, I'd argue there is improvement of the mind associated with it, because you might learn new things.

I think your argument is sound and I can't really argue anything about it though I can't say I agree with it. One common issue with video games with older people is that they can only see through rose tinted lenses that these games are only mindless fun like many board games which some are. I'd argue that many are a unique form of art that should be treated the same as books. That's a very, very deep conversation that I must refrain from. And you are right that it doesn't necessarily matter what side of the spectrum it falls on compared to a severe crime like murder.

 

1 hour ago, DarkMaster said:

I agree with @Dragoknight in that fan games should be protected. In the way I view fan games, these are peoples' stories. Stories that they've put blood, sweat, and tears into making. They're pretty much the same thing as fan fiction, with the only difference is that you can play fan games.

I had to actually go back and look at the copyright infringement laws to make sure but both fanart and fan-fiction break the same laws as fan-games so a company could order a C&D on both of those. Just thought I'd mention that.

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Guess it's time to throw my own thoughts into the ring:

 

If we look at community projects as a whole, I would say there's been way more good than harm and usually ends up being beneficial. I'm going to narrow it down to Pokemon Fan-games now which is the odd one out when it comes to all of this. Nobody has come close to hitting the sheer scale that the Pokemon Fan-game community has. I'm not talking about a single game, but the number of projects that pop up and get worked on. While many drop, you don't see even close to as many make a fully playable and fully functional Pokemon game for Final Fantasy, Tales of, or honestly even Mario. Mario and Fire Emblem are kind of big, but they are small in comparison to Pokemon. I just want people to get a slight grasp of the scale first.

 

How did it get to be so big? Well the obvious answer is because Pokemon is popular, but that isn't exactly the whole truth. It's more about the simplicity of it. Hacking was quite a bit tedious and very restricted as you had a limited amount of space, and required tools to perform certain tasks (and editing images was a pain). RMXP is a much more streamlined system which is simple to use and there was a built add-on so that all the hefty work for building a Pokemon game was done for you. So now you have a popular franchise that is even easier to build than a flash game (probably way more time consuming though).

 

Building a fan-game is no small task, I will admit to that, but building an actual game is a whole different level. 60-80 percent of a fan-game is stolen content which is where we start to differ from other sources of fan-fiction. The engine aka the scripts are the hardest to prove or use against someone as coding can be similar and still can be considered different so long as it doesn't follow what the original source code does. Very complicated but we're not here to discuss legal terms. Most music (and sounds) from the game are remixes from other players which obviously are not original from the main-game series or whatever game they are from. Graphics are so-so as some are completely original and others are ripped or edits from the original source. Most trainer sprites are simply edits using the old frames of trainer sprites from the source game. The story is original so it must be completely original and mine, right? That's similar to saying a book where you simply changed all the names is your own creation. I highly disagree with having protection laws on fan-games as it kind of is legalizing stealing.

 

Now there's also the concern of profits. Money is a gray area and sometimes projects ask for money because they either need it or would like at least some coin for there work. Sometimes it's mixed or disguised as something else such as supporting the site, but we kind of know the reason people are "donating." I'm not against donations believe it or not as I feel that's presented as a choice, but I really do not want to get started with Patreon and that field. Coin doesn't matter as I said before. The bigger concern and more scarce resource is time. It takes time to play and beat these games. Remember the C&D for Pokemon Uranium? That hit over 1 million downloads in less than a week. That's a number that would make even companies like Square Enix have a mild panic attack. Let's just be theoretical and each person is worth $5. That'd be a whopping 5 million in profits that a possible company may have missed out on. That's a lot of money and even enough to make a desired sequel for many smaller companies. Could you imagine a world without Fire Emblem simply because most players were busy playing Pokemon Bestagame at the time they almost went under?

[Abyssreaper99]

This topic has made me curious and I want to throw my two cents in. I personally believe that fangames are a grey morality area.

 

I believe that fangames and modding don't really hurt companies financially, some companies such as Bethesda even encourage people to mod their own stuff as long as they don't break any copyright infringement laws. Fangames often cater to a certain proportion of fans that aren't being catered to by the companies themselves, whether going for a more mature (darker) story or increased difficulty/ creativity. The only time that difficulty is ever created in main series pokemon games is either through online competitive battling or via extreme level jumps like Dark Rising (Necrozma and Cynthia from Diamond and Pearl comes to mind here). Most people who play fangames are just looking for something outside the norm and will still buy the main series games to support the original company. Fangames also appeal to those who would never play main series pokemon in a million years but something about said that appeals to them so wouldn't hurt the company either way.

 

In regards to money, I think that fangame devs shouldn't actively keep pestering people for money (I don't see no fangame creators on here doing this but there probably are some out there that do) but if fans should wish to give donations then by no means am I against that as it's their choice. If a fangame dev does appear to hassle people for money then I agree that the fangame in question should be C&D'd. The mobile apps you often see on play store or app store that charge users to play and add microtransactions are definitely wrong and should be shut down as this causes way more harm than most fangames ever could.

 

Lets talk legal talk. Whilst I adore fangames myself and will never stop playing them, I agree with Commander in that fangames should not come under legal protection. Fangames themselves do use resources that was originally from GF themselves. The company is not obligated to allow them to keep running but probably will if they don't have too much presence (like Uranium sadly was). Romhacks fall more under piracy laws as it requires a base game to run. 

 

Fangames could potentially benefit big companies if they choose to utilize them correctly. Let's say Game Freak did stumble upon Reborn and Rejuvenation and instead of a C&A, they decide to play through it in order to analyse what a select part of their audience may want? They could think "Hey, the sort of story may not be possible for our games but we could expand the field effects concept a bit more and increase our difficulty slightly if we had a certain mode" and then implement the ideas they got from these fangames. This could allow existing customers of their main franchise to be more satisfied and potentially draw more in.

 

I'm probably being a little naive in some areas but I'm going to sum up my opinion: Although fangames shouldn't be protected legally, they could be tolerated companies if fangames remain free (this is my morally grey self coming out here). Paid fanworks are bad and should immediately be C&D'd. Fangames will exist as long as companies only cater to a small portion of their true audience (not their perceived audience).

[wcv]

5 hours ago, Commander said:

Not necessarily true, but we don't necessarily call it fan-games. Could be other forms of media and such as fan-fiction written works, songs, or a dance if you really want it. It's more the game radiates with people than the budget or size of a company (*cough* Undertale *cough*).

True, but in that case fangames hurting the company is even less likely since it means so much to them.

[Candy]

Just want to throw this in: unless we can estimate sales of a video game without possibility of piracy, we can't say for sure that piracy doesn't hurt sales. Piracy has existed for a long time and the internet has only made it more convenient. Sure, game companies make huge amount of sales, but could they be making even more money? We don't know because taking piracy out of the equation changes the number of players and buyers, which is at least outside my scope of mathematics.

[wcv]

3 minutes ago, Candy said:

Just want to throw this in: unless we can estimate sales of a video game without possibility of piracy, we can't say for sure that piracy doesn't hurt sales. Piracy has existed for a long time and the internet has only made it more convenient. Sure, game companies make huge amount of sales, but could they be making even more money? We don't know because taking piracy out of the equation changes the number of players and buyers, which is at least outside my scope of mathematics.

Other people HAVE done the math.

 

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy-doesnt-hurt-game-sales-may-actually-help/

 

And then withheld it because it doesn't fit with corporate lies.

[Candy]

51 minutes ago, wcv said:

Other people HAVE done the math.

 

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy-doesnt-hurt-game-sales-may-actually-help/

 

And then withheld it because it doesn't fit with corporate lies.

That's interesting, even if the study can't imitate a piracy-free world 100%.

The below sentence caught my eye when I started reading:

"To be more precise, the study estimates that for every 100 games that are downloaded illegally, players actually legally obtain 24 more games (including free games) than they would in a world in which piracy didn't exist"

I wish they hadn't included free games in the study, because it skews the point of the study. On the one hand, it supports that people who play pirated games increase curiosity for more games. For example, my playing a free dress up game may make me want to play other free dress up games. However it's less certain whether a person would pay cash to play something similar. In my earlier example, I don't see why I would play a paid game that does pretty much the same thing as the free version. Given that Pokémon fan games are free and similar versions to the canon games (albeit TPC has been improving graphics which can't be easily matched), I think the second category applies better.

I also am not fond of survey studies- maybe because I'm an empirical scientist lol. Self-report is tricky because you might be getting responses from "trolls", and there's also like a myriad of response bias like society desirability bias which is difficult to exclude, especially because there's no real consequence for being dishonest on an anonymous survey. Anyway take home message is things are working currently regardless of whether it's optimal or not so let's just not strain our brains so much lol

[DarkMaster]

8 hours ago, Commander said:

I had to actually go back and look at the copyright infringement laws to make sure but both fanart and fan-fiction break the same laws as fan-games so a company could order a C&D on both of those. Just thought I'd mention that.

The thing is though, do you actually SEE companies taking down fan art and fan fiction? No. They don't care about them because they see it more as hype or praise for a game than copyright infringement. An example I'm using is Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Victory Fire (Not to be confused with the fan game of the same name) is a fan comic that has been going on since March of 2012, and is still updating to this day. It ties together plot points, characters, and elements from PMD: Rescue Team and Explorers, Colosseum and XD, Ranger, Black and White, and the anime. Yes, the anime. Have they done anything about it? No, because they don't care that someone is making a comic involving all these games, tying together all of them, with well over 700 pages. So tell me this, why take down fan games when they've ignored fan art, fiction, and comics that do the same thing?

[ProjectIceman]

Ahh...the slippery slope of the ethics of Pokemon Fan games...

 

Well, from a business standpoint, I can see why Nintendo (I will be talking about Pokemon specifically since there are companies that encourage fan game making) is defensive about people making fan games. After all, in their eyes people are probably saying, "Why should I play a new, expensive Pokemon game when I can get a game with an engaging storyline for free?" And with Social Media like Twitter, Instagram, Myspace, and Facebook it has become easy to find these games.

 

From an outlookers/customers standpoint, I honestly think these fangames will do more good than harm for Pokemon, especially if they play their cards right. Think about it. You pretty much have people who are creating storylines and designing games for free. Which means you have a pool of people who you can hire to make games like this. And I would bet some of them wouldn't mind these games actually being turned into mainstream games on the Nintendo platform like Undertale was (maybe, don't quote me on that).

 

There are many other things to consider, like competition (though fan games are free or because they are free) and stuff like that...honestly, if Pokemon was to make a Pokemon RPG maker for the Switch or a future platform, they would make a lot of money off of that. Maybe that could be a solution.

 

Just a thought.

[Commander]

On 10/8/2018 at 12:20 PM, Candy said:

I wish they hadn't included free games in the study, because it skews the point of the study. On the one hand, it supports that people who play pirated games increase curiosity for more games. For example, my playing a free dress up game may make me want to play other free dress up games. However it's less certain whether a person would pay cash to play something similar. In my earlier example, I don't see why I would play a paid game that does pretty much the same thing as the free version. Given that Pokémon fan games are free and similar versions to the canon games (albeit TPC has been improving graphics which can't be easily matched), I think the second category applies better.

I also am not fond of survey studies- maybe because I'm an empirical scientist lol. Self-report is tricky because you might be getting responses from "trolls", and there's also like a myriad of response bias like society desirability bias which is difficult to exclude, especially because there's no real consequence for being dishonest on an anonymous survey. Anyway take home message is things are working currently regardless of whether it's optimal or not so let's just not strain our brains so much lol

(Sorry for late replies as I've been busy)

 

Pirating is something we can keep track of and research and really video games is a very, very small branch onto the discussion of pirating. The most common ones are shows and movies and even broader is software itself. Let me see if I can find an article on it being bad:

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nelsongranados/2015/12/03/how-piracy-hurts-the-filmmakers-and-artists-you-admire/#56c0d8164554

 

It's about movies but it does bring up the point that smaller companies can be driven out by having their movies free of access. Again, that's a possibility but I'm not finding any good source to explain the financial impact of piracy. And that's where we get into the gray area. We don't know and we probably never will figure out the true impact of pirating (yes it is bad and you should buy a copy to support a company). Anyways, we can get a rough estimate of how impacting pirating for the Pokemon company is and...I would say that it's not even a 1% impact. Pokemon is not hurt financially at all from this discussion though I did notice two very unusual patterns if VG Chartz is correct (this number can be slightly off):

 

Diamond and Pearl sold better than Ruby and Sapphire. This is obviously expected since I'm pretty sure the DS was more popular than the GBA, but it's by a whopping 2 million while most of the other new gen games kind of sold very close to each other. Now here's the crazier thing: ORAS outsold HGSS. This is not normal as most games in a series the latest ones usually do slightly generate less and less sales (not always) and now I'm going to throw something absolutely crazy at you showing the sales with popular hacks/fan-games at the time:

 

Gen III sales: 15.85 million

Gen IV sales: 18.25 million

Gen V sales: 15.18 million

Fan-games/Hacks at the time: Sacred Gold, Ruby Destiny Series, Raptor (etc)

Gen VI sales: 16.05 million

Fan-games/Hacks at the time: Reborn (E7-12), Zeta/Omnicron, Brown, SPEE (etc)

Gen VII sales: 15.02

Fan-games/Hacks: Reborn (E13-18), Insurgence, Phoenix Rising

 

Now you may look at this and go "oh, these big fan-games are impacting sales" and that is one way to interpret the data. But we have something VERY interesting to look at and to consider. Gen VI was released when the handheld was thriving and kind of had a monopoly of the handheld market at this point while Gen VII came out near the end of its lifespan and the switch came out not long after. Gen IV and V was the exact same story. So now want to hear something crazier: the 3ds only had half the consoles sold as the DS did. It could be argued that based on the playerbase ratio, Gen VI and VII are the best selling Pokemon games. It's kind of crazy how well Gen VII did despite being the lowest selling new generation on this list. So with half the playerbase, the games did as well as Gen V. I want that to sink in. Also based on projections, Gen VIII likely will sell 15 million on the switch.

 

So does this mean fan-games helped sales? No, they still likely hurt sales, but we're looking at small scale impacts that are so hard to prove or disprove either way. Pokemon is still doing very, very well and are at a healthy zone despite what has been going on. If we look at SE's Final Fantasy series, we can see they are starting to nose dive with 15 being their lowest selling game of the modern ones (FFX and beyond). Sorry to nerd out, but I just wanted to point out that money really isn't up for discussion since we're arguing over a possible $100,000 compared to the millions they make for each game.

 

On 10/8/2018 at 12:33 PM, DarkMaster said:

The thing is though, do you actually SEE companies taking down fan art and fan fiction? No. They don't care about them because they see it more as hype or praise for a game than copyright infringement. An example I'm using is Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Victory Fire (Not to be confused with the fan game of the same name) is a fan comic that has been going on since March of 2012, and is still updating to this day. It ties together plot points, characters, and elements from PMD: Rescue Team and Explorers, Colosseum and XD, Ranger, Black and White, and the anime. Yes, the anime. Have they done anything about it? No, because they don't care that someone is making a comic involving all these games, tying together all of them, with well over 700 pages. So tell me this, why take down fan games when they've ignored fan art, fiction, and comics that do the same thing?

So I did do some research to get the idea of the scope you're talking about. If fan fiction was getting the reception and in a way "advertisement" all the shut down fan-games did, we could see a very interesting change in how things are handled and what gets shut down. Fan-art is impossible to shut down (trust me, Nintendo tried taking down...certain things) since it's a giant pool and it's endless. Do I even have to go into further than this:

 

Spoiler

 

 

It's also costly to properly deal with these things and games...seem to be the closest thing to games. Japan is kind of unusual when it comes to fan works even allowing for the sale of doujins though I'm not sure on the stance of games in Japan. They are way, way more popular than anything we mention since a piece of fanart gets reception and feedback for x amount of time before fading. Interesting thing about Fan-games is that were in this weird period where they've turned up really good...which is kind of unusual if not unheard of.

 

On 10/9/2018 at 8:41 AM, ProjectIceman said:

From an outlookers/customers standpoint, I honestly think these fangames will do more good than harm for Pokemon, especially if they play their cards right. Think about it. You pretty much have people who are creating storylines and designing games for free. Which means you have a pool of people who you can hire to make games like this. And I would bet some of them wouldn't mind these games actually being turned into mainstream games on the Nintendo platform like Undertale was (maybe, don't quote me on that).

 

There are many other things to consider, like competition (though fan games are free or because they are free) and stuff like that...honestly, if Pokemon was to make a Pokemon RPG maker for the Switch or a future platform, they would make a lot of money off of that. Maybe that could be a solution.

Taking off my critic hat for a moment, we've got a very interesting issue here. If there was an RPGmaker pack for Pokemon, that would kind of open source it in a way. Very dangerous and risky move given it's basically Nintendo's most protected franchise (they'd possibly sacrifice Mario before Pokemon...oh wait they kind of have and it worked super well). If we go the super mario maker route, it'd just be an inferior essentials as we likely wouldn't be able to touch or edit the scripts.

 

There's just no good solution to the issue at hand. Maybe in 10 years we'll be able to have a base where both sides can be at peace, but at the current situation, there's no feasible way to regulate or maintain a licensing system that won't get out of hand. Pokemon DOES have competition but because they were at the right place at the right time, most other monster collecting games are just considered "inferior Pokemon games"...even if many them are far, far superior. It is an interesting idea for a Sandbox Pokemon game, but I don't think there's a big enough audience to appeal towards an official version (100k vs 10 million is a very big difference and that's me being generous to the fan-game/hack community)