Nintendo Is Already Taking Down Palworld Pokemon Mods

thegamer.com:

Only three days after Palworld launched, which fans have been calling 'Pokemon with guns' since it was announced anyway, someone made a mod that turned the player into Ash Ketchum and Pals into 'mons. But less than a day later, it has already been taken down by Nintendo.

As reported by Games Radar, trying to access the mod page now takes you to an error that reads, "This mod is under moderation review." Videos on social media have also been taken down, such as YouTuber Toasted's which now displays the message, "This media has been disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner."

Fearing Nintendo's legal team, the Palworld modding community is already distancing itself from Pokemon mods such as these. In the dedicated Discord server, admin Archery 100 announced, "I' 'm sure many of you have been seeing all the content regarding the Pokemon mod for Palworld. While the memes and such are hilarious, the mod alone hosts a giant risk to the community and we need to take precautions so that Nintendo's lawyers don't nuke all of us with litigious actions. The mod is highly likely using ripped assets and is very illegal in Nintendo's eyes."

This server really grew overnight and we see a lot of potential with this community! That being said, we want to take the necessary steps to ensure we can nurture all this together.

Sharing links and files to mod is no longer allowed in the Discord serveer, and anyone breaking that rule has been threatened with "an immediate ban". This is because Discord DMs have been used in DMCA cases before, so to protect the server and those running it, they cannot risk hosting mods that Nintendo is taking action against.

It's not the first case this year of fan-made projects getting shut down in fear of Nintendo's legal team. Portal 64, a demake of the iconic puzzle game, was cancelled after Valve reached out to developer James Lambert expressing concern about the game using Libultra, the official Nintendo 64 SDK. "While I might not be a big