Curmudgeon Nintendo Forces Garry's Mod To Wipe 20 Years Of Content
Nintendo is famous—or infamous depending on your perspective—for being a bit of a buzzkill when it comes to other people using its intellectual property and technology. Of course, some of this is justified, like with the case of the Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu that settled with the games company earlier this year. Now, however, Nintendo is apparently going after community-made content for Garry’s Mod on the Steam Workshop. This is forcing the developer to dig through nearly two decades of content for the ever-popular sandbox game.
Garry’s Mod (colloquially "Gmod") is a physics sandbox game released in 2006 that runs on Valve’s Source engine and is the origin of a variety of internet culture icons you might not realize, like Prop Hunt, Trouble in Terrorist Town (TTT), and many more. While Source Filmmaker is the software behind the viral internet series, Garry’s Mod has also been tied to the “Skibidi Toilet” craze recently popular among folks of a younger persuasion.
In any event, all this content and the games within the game are primarily driven by the community creating maps, objects, characters, and more, and then uploading them to the Steam Workshop for G-Mod. This content includes some things that either replicate or come very close to replicating items from Nintendo's library of intellectual property, which is how you summon the company’s aggressive legal team.
Yesterday afternoon, a note appeared on the Steam page for G-Mod titled “Nintendo stuff on Steam Workshop.” This note explained that some Nintendo-related Workshop content had been removed due to a takedown request from Nintendo, which the G-Mod team is respecting. They explain that “this is fair enough” and that “[Nintendo doesn't] want you playing with that stuff in Garry's Mod - that's their decision, we have to respect that and take down as much as we can.” The most concerning part of this is that the G-Mod team has nearly two decades of content possibly including Nintendo IP that they have to filter out. As such, they request that “If you want to help us by deleting your Nintendo related uploads and never uploading them again, that would help us a lot.”
Honestly, it is sort of surprising it took this long for Nintendo to come knocking at G-Mod’s door, but even still, it's a frustrating circumstance. This is community-made content being hosted, and while we wouldn’t expect anything different from the legendarily-jealous publisher, this event is still disappointing, all the same. With all this in mind, we wish the GMod team the best with their Sisyphean task of combing the sprawling Steam Community workshop for Nintendo content.
