Japan has some of the most restrictive copyright exceptions among major developed countries. Unlike the U.S., it lacks a broad fair use doctrine, which leaves parody and transformative works with far less legal protection. The TeamFourStar situation is a good example of how that can discourage even highly transformative fan creations. Whether that’s motivated by culture, business, or both, Japanese companies tend to be far more protective of their intellectual property than their Western counterparts, sometimes to a degree that feels excessive from an American perspective.
In Japan some guy got sentenced for two years for uploading a video of the entirety of a Steins;Gate game.
What’s worse is that nintendo likes to kill fangames shortly before announcing or releasing their own games that would be competing with them.
AM2R was killed for Samus Returns.
Project M for Smash Ultimate.
Pokemon Uranium for whichever pokemon gen was that year.
In each of these cases, it is my opinion that the fangame was the better game.
Sega is only that friendly towards Sonic fanworks, otherwise they struck down at least a Streets of Rage remake.
Speaking from experience, there’s a very different mindset between Japanese and North America in regards to fan made stuff, like mods, etc., to the point that I was told to stay absolutely shut about my love of emulation and fan games when having dinner with a certain JP dev friend of my wife’s. By contrast, a US dev friend literally was showing me his emulator keychain, lol.
Sega is a weird case, though, because they’re both US, European, and Japanese in equal parts (to the point that if one flops, they all feel it). Leads to some interesting debates across teams though, or so I’m told.
Can’t speak of Nintendo of America, though. They’re up in Washington iirc, so I’ve never met anyone from there.
Is there more context for this?
You have my bless.
wait, got a link to the story behind SEGA’s?
Sega’s is oversimplified to the point someone who doesn’t already know the story would be misinformed. Christian Whitehead was employed at Sega before this for porting classic Sonic games (1, 2, and CD) using his Retro Engine, and they later let him and his team make Sonic Mania after he presented a prototype to Takashi Iizuka.
That is, Whitehead intended from the start to bring it to Sonic Team, whom he’d already worked for, as a prototype to have it officially produced and released. Sega had a lot of influence over the broader development, mainly the inclusion of classic levels. They didn’t just take a random fan game and slap a “SEGA” logo over it.
If anything, the image for Sega should be Sonic CD for iPhone, as he was just a fan at that time making a fan port. Sonic Mania is kind of a quasi-fan game, in the sense that Whitehead was a huge fan and did work at Sega in the first place because of his fan port proof of concept.
Edit: Also, here’s what Sega thinks of its fans in 2026.
As someone who worked w/ the Sonic Mania team (after Sonic Mania was released), this is also my understanding of events.
Didn’t Sega just slap their name on the Sonic murder mystery game? They essentially saw a gan game and was like, “we’ll publish it,” but it’s free.
