Garry’s Mod studio is removing 20 years of Nintendo uploads following DMCA takedowns

The studio behind sandbox game Garry’s Mod says it will be removing all Nintendo-related uploads after receiving DMCA takedown requests that appear to be from Nintendo.

Garry’s Mod is a sandbox game where players can upload their own objects and character models and use them to make animations or other games.

This has inevitably resulted in the addition of copyrighted content to the game, with numerous users extracting character models from other games and uploading them to Garry’s Mod.

There are over 1.8 million pieces of user-submitted content in the game’s Steam Workshop, with all-time most popular downloads including Pikachu, Solid Snake, Lara Croft, Gordon Freeman from Half-Life, Steve from Minecraft and Dragon Ball Z characters.

A news update on the game’s Steam page says all the Nintendo content that has been uploaded to the game since its original inception in 2004 is now in the process of being removed.

“Some of you may have noticed that certain Nintendo related workshop items have recently been taken down,” the message 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.

“This is an ongoing process, as we have 20 years of uploads to go through. If you want to help us by deleting your Nintendo related uploads and never uploading them again, that would help us a lot.”

Users started suggesting that the DMCA takedown requests didn’t actually come from Nintendo itself, and were instead the work of trolls trying to falsely demand ownership of the IP.

Earlier today Garry’s Mod creator Garry Newman noted these suggestions, saying: “Yes, we have got your emails and DMs, we have seen your threads, we’re doing our own investigations. We need to take these things seriously (particularly from Nintendo), but we also can’t let people misuse DMCA takedowns.”

However, shortly before this article was published, Newman confirmed: “I have been assured that the takedowns have been verified by Nintendo as legit, so this will now continue as planned. Sorry.”

Some users who uploaded Nintendo-themed content have started attempting to archive the content before it’s removed and make it available somewhere other than Steam so users can still access it.

“Quick update regarding our DMCA’d Mario add-ons,” wrote one user. “Everything has been saved and archived in a Discord server, there won’t be any uploads.”