Nintendo issues DMCA takedowns for specific Switch games to art library sharing site SteamGridDB
Nintendo is yet again back into its old copyright takedowns, issuing DMCAs.
This time, the affected site has been SteamGridDB, which many people have been using to create image assets for Steam and non-Steam games when added manually into it. Many more use it to link their ROMs through emulation into Steam as non-Steam games.
The Steam Grid database website has gained popularity over the years, more so due to the recent surge in Steam Deck users and their use of EmuDeck to setup their emulation libraries. EmuDeck itself provides a tool called Steam Rom Manager, which allows the user to configure their Steam image assets based on a community database that supplies all of the images detected from a specific ROM name, and from there the images are applied into Steam itself based on the grabbed images from the database if it finds a match.
At the moment, the website received DMCA takedowns for the following Switch games' images:
- Pokemon Scarlet & Violet
- Splatoon 3
- Super Mario Odyssey
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
- Xenoblade Chronicles 3
SteamGridDB didn't offer any kind of ROM downloads nor links to them, the only offered material are plain images for a wide variety of games, and many of them are user-supplied and/or custom made by several users and supporters.
With this, Nintendo has started DMCA'ing websites over images.
Has Nintendo gone too far? What's gonna be next? All mentions of Mario in non-Nintendo websites getting DMCA'd?
Only time will tell.
Breath of the Wild entry at SteamGridDB BotW Backup at Archive.org Source
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