Following my last question what are your thoughts on Nintendo's strict policies concerning fan games?
I mean, I kind of have a whole video about this. I think there’s too much conflation between the work of fans and the work of bootleggers. There’s a long history of cheap, poorly games created and sold by pirates. 7 Grand Dad, Sonic Jam 6, Super King Kong 99, etc. Those are legitimately harmful bootleg games created (or in some cases, hacked together) to steal money, basically.
Nintendo in particular has always been hugely invested in stopping piracy. As of this writing, there’s a post going around my Tumblr dash of Nintendo banning entire 3DS systems from accessing the Internet on the firmware level if they have homebrew installed. If you connect your 3DS to the internet while homebrew is installed, it will permanently disable all WiFi functionality on that system. That’s not just blocking you from using the eShop, it’s street pass, everything. You can’t turn WiFi on. The button won’t work anymore, or ever again. It doesn’t matter if what you were doing was harmless or not. That’s the kind of serious Nintendo is about piracy. Always has been.
And its these kind of “all or nothing” rules that Nintendo applies to fan games. You may not be pirates, people at Nintendo know you aren’t pirates, but they have to set an example and they’re going to do so with extreme prejudice.
In my video I outline ways to maybe avoid stepping on Nintendo’s toes, and I do think that will help you fly under the radar to an extent. The problem is its literally impossible to follow my rules. If you want to distribute your game, every place (Mediafire, etc.) available to host it runs advertising to pay for server costs. Nobody is allowed to profit from Nintendo’s stuff but Nintendo. Downloading a fan game drives ad revenue to that file host.
Even hosting the file yourself, on your own web server, probably won’t work because you have to pay somebody for that. Even if the server is a physical PC in your basement, you still have to pay the phone company. It’s hard to know where the boundaries are, and I think Nintendo would be happy if the takeaway was “stop, don’t start.”
This stuff requires a delicate touch Nintendo won’t spend the effort to provide. Fan games are no more harmful than fan art or fan fiction, but because fan games sit adjacent to real piracy, Nintendo would rather fight some of their most dedicated customers, and that really sucks.