It’s been quite a hectic week for hardcore Super Smash Bros. fans, as Nintendo took legal action to stop The Big House, a recently cancelled tournament featuring both Smash Bros. Melee and Ultimate, on the grounds that the Melee bracket was running Project Slippi, a Dolphin emulator mod that enables rollback netcode in online play for the 19-year-old game.
However, it now looks as Nintendo is increasing its use of legal resources in order to prevent the Smash community from tampering or modding their software, as a new wave of YouTube videos have started being flagged due to presumable copyright infringement denounced by the Japanese giant. As Reddit user urUrOwnperson noted, several costume or skin mods uploaded to GameBanana have begun drawing attention from Nintendo who has proceeded to request videos from popular Smash YouTubers like Mastaklo and 64iOS be removed from the platform.
Mods for Smash Ultimate have been available for quite some time, with custom fan-made skins recreating famous characters who are absent from the game, or simply adding more costumes for those already present. As it stood, dedicated fans had been able to pretty much add anyone to Smash, but that possibility may not be up to Nintendo’s liking.
This new move by Nintendo will probably put further strain on the company’s complicated relationship with Smashers, who have notably built up Smash as an esport from the ground up and are on the verge of premiering their second feature length documentary on Melee in just a few days.
The biggest reason this seems to irk Smash fans is the fact that - according to them - both the aesthetic mods and add-ons like Project Slippi are not hurting Nintendo, considering skin mods in Ultimate for characters like Goku, Noctis, and Travis Touchdown are completely free for whomever is willing to download them and run them; while Slippi runs on Melee, a game in which Nintendo could only profit from by supporting its competitive scene, something the company has rarely expressed any interest in, instead going as far as fighting back against unsanctioned tournaments.
Nintendo has been keen to clamp down on anything the company sees as a threat on their prized intellectual property, from ROM sites to mods, what’s surprising this time around is the specific targeting of small content creators.
Source: urUrOwnperson|Reddit