Bandai Namco Sends Threat Letter To Modding Site Over Supposed Trademark Issues

Here we go again. There seems to be a thing happening among a select few big name video game publishers that have decided for some reason that they want to go to war with their own modding communities. The reasons for doing so vary, but they all amount to wanting to strictly control the experience gamers have with their products. Which is absolutely silly. Mods only exist because people want them. And they want them because they enhance the gaming experience they have with these games, thereby making them more attractive for purchase and continued play.

But when you’ve declared a war like this, it gets real easy for it to turn into a total war type scenario, where no method of attack is left unused. So it seems is the case with Bandai Namco, which for some reason decided to issue a trademark threat to modding site Tekkenmods.com.

Programmer and TekkenMods.com administrator Dennis Stanistan revealed the site recently received an infringement notice from Bandai Namco. The email from Bandai Namco states that the website uses trademarked visuals and logos without prior approval. “By doing so,” it accuses, “you intentionally seek to attract Internet users to your website. This unauthorized use of Bandai/Namco’s intellectual property falsely suggests Bandai/Namco’s sponsorship or enforcement of your website.”

It’s a ridiculous claim to make for several reasons. At the very highest level, PC gamers are not going to somehow think that a third-party mod site has some affiliation with Bandai Namco just because its name, game name, or logos appear on it. If the company was going to make changes to its game, it would simply do so in an update to the game. The whole point of mod sites like this are to do things the game developers didn’t do with their games.

And while the site did remove the logos and material as demanded by Bandai Namco, Stanistan was also very clear that he didn’t believe any of this amounted to trademark infringement, in particular as the site goes out of its way to state it is not affiliated with the company.

As TekkenMods in its official response, the mod’s creator deleted it from the website. However, Stanistan denies doing anything illegal, writing, “Acknowledgement of your complaint is not an admission of any wrongdoing.”

The site administrator also pointed out that the page clearly states it is not affiliated with Bandai Namco. This, Stanistan explains, was specifically done to avoid confusion about whether TekkenMods carries any official endorsement. “Furthermore,” he writes, “the alleged ‘infringing’ elements are used in the context of fan-based content creation which aims to celebrate and promote the Tekken franchise rather than infringe upon or compete with it.”

For the love of all that is holy, I do not understand why it is so hard for some game publishers to grasp this concept. Mods are not a threat to their games. They are a free source of labor for making the games more attractive for purchase, for replayability, and for extending the longevity of the game. It’s all a boon, with little if any downside that I can find.

But for some, the war continues. I sometimes wonder if these companies even understand why they are fighting this war.