Garry's Mod is pulling down years of Nintendo content, but players suspect foul play

Nintendo may have now aimed its infamous legal prowess on Facepunch Studios of Garry’s Mod fame, from the looks of things. “They don’t want you playing with [Nintendo IP content] in Garry’s Mod,” says the recent announcement from Facepunch, with the studio now removing all Nintendo-related stuff from its Workshop.

This information comes from Facepunch Studios’ official statement on Steam, which plainly stated that the purge of any and all Nintendo content was deliberate: “This is not a mistake, the takedowns come from Nintendo,” it says.

A curious wrinkle

Early on, there was some uncertainty as to whether Nintendo really is or isn’t behind the takedown requests. Nintendo has yet to publicly chime in on the issue, and some members of the GMOD community claimed that a “fraudster” is engineering the crisis instead. In response to the community’s concerns, Garry Newman of Facepunch Studios said that his team was “doing [its] own investigations” on the matter.

Setting these suspicions of foul play aside, however, Newman has since clarified that he’s been “assured that the takedowns have been verified by Nintendo as legit, so [the content takedown] will continue as planned.”

“If you want to help us by deleting your Nintendo-related uploads and never uploading them again, that would help us a lot,” says the announcement on Steam. At the same time, some of the community members who have been keeping track of the situation as it developed have been trying their best to preserve the mods for as long as possible. A worthy objective or a breach of IP law? Time will tell.