Nintendo of America has taken down Pokémon Essentials, a Pokémon fangame creation kit, including its wiki and official download links.
Explanation of what Pokémon Essentials was via Kotaku:
A crucial revolution for the popularity of Pokémon fan games came with the 2007 creation of Pokémon Essentials, a RPG Maker XP game that allows people to create new adventures with ease.
Pokémon Essentials provides full tilesets, maps, music, and sprites that players can drag and drop onto a canvas. All the classic mechanics necessary to collect and battle Pokémon come packed-in, too. While the tool has a learning curve, for the most part, fans are able to focus more on the plot of their games. Accordingly, some cool recent projects I've spotted include narrative concepts like telling battle stories around a camp fire, and staging an attack against the notorious Silph Co. corporation.
"I cannot emphasize this enough: without Pokémon Essentials, it would have been impossible to make Pokémon Uranium, or almost any of the other Pokémon fan games that are out there," said Voluntary Twitch, the creative director behind Pokémon Uranium, a shuttered fan game that was reportedly downloaded over a million times.
Pokémon Essentials was widely used by fangame developers and thanks to it projects like Pokémon Uranium, Phoenix Rising, Ethereal Gates and Pokémon Sage exist. This will definetly have a big impact on Pokémon fangames moving forward.
Edit: Ars Technica article about the takedown:
Fans of the tool congregated around the PokeCommunity forums and a dedicated Pokémon Essentials wiki to download files, share creations, and discuss the scene. Earlier this week, however, PokéCommunity forum moderator Marin announced that "the Pokémon Essentials wikia and all downloads for it have been taken down due to a copyright claim by Nintendo of America." That means "we will not allow Pokémon Essentials or any of its assets to be hosted or distributed on PokéCommunity," the announcement reads. "We sincerely apologise that we have to do this, but there is no going around it."
A representative for Fandom, the company that hosts the wiki, confirmed to the Verge that it had "received a DMCA notice on behalf of Nintendo notifying us of content that was in violation of its copyright holdings. After carefully assessing the violations in regards to the Pokémon Essentials wiki, we came to a decision to take it down."
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/08/nintendo-shuts-down-tool-used-to-build-pokemon-fan-games/
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