The past few weeks have been a somewhat turbulent period for Nintendo and its fan communities, to say the least. After closing Super Smash Bros. By Nintendo for its plans to use third-party software to run the event online, several teams at Splatoon 2 North American Open used “Free Melee” hashtags in their names to protest the decision. The Splatoon 2 Final Live broadcast was then canceled, much to the annoyance of fans who felt Nintendo had interfered.

Now, Nintendo appears to have pissed off fans once again, after sending a cease and desist letter to the dedicated Joy-Con creator who has been selling Etika shells to charity.

Content creator CptnAlex, who runs a store on Etsy that sells custom consoles, has said it has received a moratorium on Nintendo to cover all of its products – and Etikons fell into the mix. “While [Nintendo] You didn’t specifically tell me why each design was removed, I included a copyright list that my designs broke, and Joy-Con was on that list, ” Captenalix said. “This is my only design specifically with the word Joy-Con on it, so this is clearly what they were referring to when they attached it.”

Etikons are named after Desmond “Etika” Amofah, a popular YouTuber known for his Nintendo content. Who committed suicide in June 2019. As part of prof Successful fundraising campaign, The controller shells were sold to raise money for JED, a mental health charity for teens and youth in the United States. by December last year, The initiative has raised more than $ 10,000 (£ 7.5,000) for charity.

The reason Etikons trademarked the word Joy-Con was because of the reference to the Joycon Boyz, which is the name of the fan community on Etika. According to CptnAlex, about 30 to 40 batches of shells remain, which he will likely waive at a future conference but cannot sell to charity. CptnAlex has since said that it will consider re-releasing the shells with a modified design to remove the Joycon Boyz and split Switch logo.

Eurogamer has contacted Nintendo to comment on the pause and desist, but has not heard a response yet.

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It looks like stop and pause were sent to CptnAlex by Nintendo back in September, but news of the ban has been broken over the past day. While Nintendo is technically within its rights to pursue copyright infringement cases, many fans have been outraged by Nintendo’s decision to ban a charitable initiative. Besides the pre-existing rage about Super Smash Bros. tournaments. And Splatoon 2, that was enough to get Nintendo trending on Twitter, with 167K tweets at the time of writing (although not all of them will be related to fan disputes).

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The community reaction started when the Super Smash Bros. Championship was announced. The Big House said it had to cancel its December event online, as Nintendo objected to plans to use Slippi mod as part of the event. The software makes Super Smash Bros. Melee is playable online and was used by The Big House as an alternative to hosting a personal event during the coronavirus pandemic. Nintendo said it had contacted the tournament organizers to ask them to stop. “They refused, and left Nintendo no choice but to intervene to protect its intellectual property and trademarks” (Via ribbed).

Splatoon 2 players then decided to support the Smash Championship by participating in the #FreeMelee movement on social media. to me Commentator SlimmyAt the weekend, nearly 30 percent of the teams at the North American Open ended up calling themselves in support of Millie and Smash. When the final broadcast was live Canceled due to “unforeseen implementation challenges”, Nintendo was immediately charged with – although the company’s involvement in the cancellation has yet to be confirmed.

However, all of this was enough to provoke fans to loudly complain about Nintendo’s business decisions, and the pause and desirability of Joy-Con’s charitable shells seemed to push the backlash to new heights. However Nintendo’s record of applying strict copyrightI doubt it will reverse these decisions anytime soon.