Garry’s Mod, a sandbox game developed by Facepunch Studios, is removing all Nintendo-related content from its Steam workshop.
Announced in a Steam community post, the developers have confirmed that they’re working on removing Nintendo content because of Nintendo.
“Some of you may have noticed that certain Nintendo-related workshop items have recently been taken down,” the post reads. “This is not a mistake, the takedowns came from Nintendo.”
“Honestly, this is fair enough. This is Nintendo’s content and what they allow and don’t allow is up to them. They don’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.”
According to the post, Garry’s Mod has 20 years of uploads that they need to go through and take down as much Nintendo-related content as possible.
The developers also urged players to help them by deleting their Nintendo-related content and never uploading it again.
Recently Nintendo has been cracking down on any sign of copyright infringement on their IPs, with one notable example being the recent shutdown of Yuzu, a well-known Switch emulator that was forced to shut down after being sued by Nintendo.
While it is unclear why Nintendo only started targeting Garry’s Mod now, it’s no secret that Nintendo has not been very accepting of mods for their IPs, so the takedown on Garry’s Mod while sudden, is not very surprising.
Unfortunately, the takedown would mean many projects that were passionately worked on by the community would no longer be available.