Nintendo Cracking Down On Pokemon Go 'Pirates' Despite The Game Being Free

from the overprotectionism-i-choose-you! dept

In these past few weeks, the world has become divided into two camps: those who are sick of hearing anything about Nintendo's new smash mobile hit, Pokemon Go, and those who can't get enough of it. While the media tags along for the ride and with the app shooting up the charts as the craze takes hold, it's worth keeping in mind that this is Pokemon and Nintendo we're talking about, two connected groups with a crazy history of savagely protecting anything to do with their intellectual property.

Still, it was strange to learn that Nintendo is issuing all kinds of takedown requests to "pirate" versions of the Android app that are available roughly all over the place. The reason I wrapped that word in quotation marks above is that the Pokemon Go app is entirely free and even the unofficial versions of the app still point the user back to the app's official store for any in-game purchases.

Nintendo is obviously not happy with this black market distribution. Although it doesn’t seem to hurt its stock value, the company is targeting the piracy issue behind the scenes. TorrentFreak spotted several takedown requests on behalf of Nintendo that were sent to Google Blogspot and Google Search this week. The notices list various links to pirated copies of the game, asking Google to remove them. Thus far the efforts have done little to stop the distribution. The files are still widely shared on torrent sites and various direct download services. The copies on APKmirror.com remain online as well.

So why is Nintendo engaging in a losing war against its own popularity instead of deciding to spend the time counting the money that is streaming in from its smash hit instead? Well, the speculation is that this has all to do with the geographic release windows for the app.

With no commercial gain to be had from stopping people playing the game, I’m guessing Nintendo is just trying to keep it in the hands of users in countries where Pokémon Go has been officially released. Maybe to cut back on stuff like the problems some Korean gamers are having right now.

The issue appears to be that the game doesn't really function in countries where it hasn't been officially released yet. This means that users of the unofficial apps in these countries are likely to find that no Pokemon exist to be collected, or are at least far more sparse than they will be once the release is official in that country. This has led to some minor frustration from those who downloaded the app from an unofficial source, as they wander around doing essentially nothing.

But so what? That isn't really Nintendo's problem and there's no way that the company will take on any ill-will from those downloading unofficial copies of the game where it hasn't been released yet. The app, keep in mind, is a free one and points to Nintendo's in-game store for purchases whether it's from the official app or the unofficial one. There's literally no money lost in this in any way and, it can easily be argued, the widespread availability from many different sites may well be super-charging the viral nature of the product. That should be a huge win for Nintendo, as the company gains new and free distribution channels at zero cost.

If this is about the geo-restricted release dates, I sort of get it, but I only sort of get it because I already know how crazy-insane Nintendo is in terms of controlling every last aspect of every last product it offers. The company just can't help itself, even when it can be argued the "pirated" apps are doing way more good than harm.

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Filed Under: competition, copyright, free, geoblocking, piracy, pokemon go, regional restrictions

Companies: nintendo