A modder that put Pokémon assets into Palworld just said "Nintendo has come for me" after a takedown was issued against an earlier social media post. The earlier post in question showed off a Palworld mod from creator Toasted Shoes that replaced all character and creature models with Pokémon equivalents. We're talking about Ash Ketchum for the player model, actual Pikachu, Jessie from Team Rocket, and many more.
The first post by Toasted Shoes was just a short clip showing off the Pokémon models inside of Palworld. Within 24 hours of that teaser being posted, the video was taken down by an apparent DMCA request, presumably from Nintendo. Toasted Shoes said today that "Nintendo has come for me" and posted an image of the now copyright struck initial tweet.
While there is still uncertainty about whether or not Palworld itself infringed on Nintendo's copyright, the fact that this mod used very obvious Pokémon assets was an extremely dumb move. Toasted Shoe's mods are also locked behind a Patreon paywall, meaning that the chances were extremely high that he planned to charge for access to a mod is an obvious infringement on Nintendo's copyright. This outcome of a copyright claim and takedown could be seen coming from miles away.
In a brief interview with IGN, Toasted Shoes says that he still plans to publish a video showcasing the mod, but will "comply with any further copyright notices from Nintendo." He also says that he hopes to "complete the mod pack and release it for free to the public". For now though, they "are playing it by ear as we don't want any legal troubles".
It still isn't clear whether or not Nintendo will pursue any legal action against Palworld itself. Palworld's developer Pocketpair claims that they cleared legal reviews prior to release. There have been several comparisons made between Palworld's Pals designs and Pokemon ever since Palworld's release on Friday, January 19th.
Palworld has now sold over 6 million copies in just four days. This is a further increase of 1 million units since its last milestone that was hit a mere 20 hours prior. Palworld is now the second biggest game on Steam ever released in terms of concurrent players. Today, Palworld edged past the former second place holder, Counter-Strike, and now has a peak concurrent player count of 1,847,492.
Instead, this person that locks his mods behind a paywall decided to go Twitter, promote the mod of a game that is seeing near unprecedented overnight success with a video that went viral, got media attention, etc.
Just pure clown shoes behavior.