Site That Listed Information About 3rd Party Pokémon Fan-Games Shuts Down Under Threat

The battle The Pokémon Co. decided to wage against its own best fans in the form of DMCA takedowns on video game mods and fan-created content has now escalated into a full-blown war. This has all the hallmarks of Nintendo’s anti-emulation war from a few years ago, except this probably makes even less sense than did that whole thing. As of late, The Pokémon Co. has been on a DMCA blitz for all kinds of content, including mere video content from nearly a decade ago showing mods injecting Pokémon content into 3rd party games. If you’re wondering why the company is bothering with any of this, given the prevalence of these sorts of mods for all kinds of content out there, well, welcome to the damned club.

And yet the war continues. And the latest victim in all of this is Relic Castle, a site that has been shut down under threat from the Pokémon people, even though the site doesn’t host any actual infringing content directly. Instead, the site was designed to be a discussion forum about Pokémon fan-made games, and where some of those discussions included links to other websites where those fan-games were hosted.

Relic Castle was set up in 2014 as an online forum where people could talk about Pokémon fan games, and could also share links to download these games from third-party websites. Relic Castle never hosted any of these files directly; instead, fan games using a mix of new and old assets were often downloaded from places like Mediafire and Google Drive. The forums were just a convenient hub for links and gave the community a place to discuss Pokémon fan games. However, it’s all gone now.

On March 21, the Relic Castle Twitter account posted a message stating that the site had been shut down “following a DMCA takedown notice.” Relic Castle did not confirm who sent the notice.

I’m trying to imagine a world in which it wasn’t The Pokémon Co. that issued this DMCA takedown notice, but I’m simply not creative enough to get there. While I’ll reiterate again that Relic Castle did not host any infringing material itself, here we see the downstream effects of the Grokster ruling, in which a site can potentially be liable for copyright infringement if it is deemed to have taken any affirmative steps to induce or encourage infringement. That makes a site that would otherwise plainly be hosting nothing more than protected speech suddenly liable for the actions its users take if they include posting links to infringing content where the site is seen as encouraging such behavior.

And lost in all of this is one simple fact: the folks who make up the usership of Relic Castle are by and large huge Pokémon fans! You don’t become a member of a Pokémon fan-game site if you aren’t absolutely into Pokémon. And you aren’t absolutely into Pokémon if you haven’t spent some amount of money on some amount of legitimate Pokémon products somewhere. In other words, the Pokémon Co. found a forum site where fans were discussing one of the many aspects of their fandom… and shut that shit down. Fun, as it turns out, isn’t something the company appreciates you having.

And while we don’t know for sure at the time of this writing that the company is the one behind the DMCA takedown, the trendline from the company is certainly suggestive.

This is just the latest salvo in the war against Pokémon mods and fan content. Recently, a seven-year-old YouTube video featuring modded Pokémon in Call of Duty was taken down, too. Some fear The Pokémon Company and Nintendo—spurred by the success of Palworld aka Pokémon with Guns—might be cracking down on content that might have been able to fly under the radar before. For now, we don’t know who ordered Relic Castle to be shut down, but for Pokémon content creators and modders, it doesn’t matter. Things are looking riskier than ever for them.

Put another way, it’s never been riskier for some of Pokémon’s biggest fans to know if expressing their fandom will get them in trouble. Is that really what the company wants?