>>48941990Basically, let's say a company grew a pair of balls and did what I outlined - they saw a fan or team of fans that had made say a romhack or a fan game, or an expansion, an online network like the one for Advance Wars etc. etc. and they said "this is good, let's approach them".
They do so and say "we'll pay you X amount to take this off of you, made same changes to our tastes and release this as official. You'll get X% of the royalties. From then on anything you make has to go by us, and if we like it then we'll release it. If everything goes to plan we'll have you onboard. Deal or no deal? If not, we're shutting you down with DMCAs etc."
You can see how, even though there's still room for bullshit, how much the above is an improvement over the current "DMCA everything" approach. It will undoubtedly lead to fans promoting mods and romhacks that they like to Nintendo or whomever. If a popular mod doesn't get officialsed, and there isn't an obvious good reason like the creator behaving like an idiot, then you can expect fan backlash akin to what see right now.
This is the nook in which "the catch" lurks. Rival companies will say "alright, let's hire "creators" (authentic fans or not) to make content, and shill it in fan communities. Then we can further create media fluff to pressure Nintendo into officialising the content. That way, we can essentialy control the creative output of Nintendo from the ground up, freely borrowing their IPs for our industrial-grade projects that otherwise wouldn't fly. If we want, we can deliberately try to slip poison into games ala the Hot Coffee controversy, in the hopes that it sinks Nintendo and thus eliminates a rival. And in general, we can always try to tear open a loophole in copyright law to claim that Nintendo have voided their copyrights, meaning we can just steal Mario and shit for our own products and licensed merch. Bling bling!"
It's stupid but that's the truth of business. Hence cowardice.
