Garry’s Mod is facing a deluge of Nintendo-related DMCA takedown notices

Facepunch Studios has announced on Steam that it’s removing 20-year-old Nintendo-related workshop items for its sandbox game Gary’s mod to comply with the requirements of the Japanese company. Earlier this year, an X user by the name of Brewster T. Kupa published that a group of trolls are filing fake DMCA claims against the game to remove Nintendo’s add-ons and force the add-on creators to shut down. The perpetrators allegedly used a fake email to pose as Nintendo lawyers to send DMCA takedown notices. Facepunch Studios said in its new announcement that it believes the requests legitimately come from Nintendo and that it should respect the company’s decision and begin removing items related to its IPs.

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

Koopa said in a follow-up tweet that they emailed the company to let them know that the requests were not actually from Nintendo. They previously argued that the takedown notices could not be from the Japanese gaming giant because Nintendo’s add-ons have been around since 2005 and because the company would have contacted Valve, the publisher of Gary’s modmyself.

While the announcement is still pending, Facepunch founder Gary Newman has announced that his team has received people’s emails and DMs and that the developer is investigating. “We have to take these things seriously (especially Nintendo), but we also can’t let people abuse DMCA takedowns,” Newman wrote. We’ve reached out to Nintendo to ask if the takedown received by Facepunch is indeed from the company, and we’ll update this post once they respond.