Stencyl's Stance on Fangames?

I have no idea if this has come up previously, so I'm apologizing beforehand if this is a repeat thread.

People are going to want to make fangames.  And a good chunk of folks who aren't going to be making fangames will want to be using resources from existing games (sprites, music, sound effects, edited sprites).

How will Stencyl handle allowing/disallowing game creators to monetize their games and keep track of whether existing content is in use in their games or not?

Kongregate is one side of the spectrum, where ALL GAME CONTENT MUST BE ORIGINAL (which makes sense in their case because ALL of the games uploaded there are earning $$$ for the user).  This is much easier for them to moderate because they are a large company that probably has employees whose job it is to sniff out incorrect use of existing game content, and their large player base means offenders get reported when anything of the nature does slip through.

YoYo Games is the other side of the spectrum, with LOL ANYTHING GOES, GO WILD.  (I haven't visited YoYo Games in a while and I have no idea if they offer any kind of payment to their uploaders...)

But anyway

So like

Fangames? \(._. )/

I don't think at this time or at anytime it would be possible for Stencyl to moderate this. The reason being, you can export the file as a .swf and upload to other websites which makes it very hard for us to track what is going on, unless that is something hidden in games. I could maybe see some moderation of it on the Stencyl website itself, but I think it could be a grey area.

My other reason why it would be difficult to do is that I have never seen any action taken against Adobe, because someone made a game with content that was not original and possibly copyrighted.

Though, I think in the end it would be best if Jon were to answer this question with his thoughts on how things like this would be handled, at least for Stencyl's own protection.

(I haven't visited YoYo Games in a while and I have no idea if they offer any kind of payment to their uploaders...)

Nope, all the ad-revenue goes to YoYo.

We will promptly takedown things upon a legitimate DMCA request, which we already have a form for. We won't have time to actively take down content without requests and won't feature any content that clearly falls under the scope of violating copyright.

The fact of the matter is that DMCA for all but the most high profile fangames is close to nothing, unless it's related to Square-Enix.

So, would the use of sprites or edited sprites (or music or whatever) be frowned upon in general?  I mean, as long as the game being made with them clearly states that it is not intended for profit and gives credit to sources, et cetera et cetera, I don't really give any second thoughts to Flash games or RPG Maker games using content from other games.  Especially in cases where the fangame is a tribute of some kind, and as a whole is really well-done, I think they're pretty cool.

We have the exact same stance that any UGC site has whether it's Kongregate, Scratch, YYG or whoever - we won't bat an eye unless we're told to take it down. That's neither an endorsement nor a ban.

In my experience, I haven't seen it happen on sites like these.

Ah, well this is all good to know. u3u  It is something I have been wondering about but never quite got around to asking until now!

So we can make fangames, unless we're told to be taken down, huh? That's very good to know! Because I have just a couple of fangames I want to make using Stencyl since other game makers cannot make what I have in mind. As long as we give credit to the creators of the franchises, right?

Though I still plan to make original games because I have a short one I'm thinking of starting with that I don't see people made yet with Stencyl.

Correct.

This reminds me, I believe the very first game idea I made a topic for on the Stencyl site was a Mega Man fangame. Mega Man Madness. For what it's worth, Capcom fangames are probably less risky, considering Capcom seems to be much more tolerant of fangames. They even promote some on their community site!

If I make fangames at some point (I probably will, I just can't help it!) I probably wouldn't upload them to Stencyl's site. It's not bad if we don't do that, right?

If we are of risky on not risky fan games thread... Do you know what is HudsonSoft's policy on that? Because I making Adventure Island fangame now and just want to know.

I'm sure they wouldn't get upset if you made a fangame of a 23 year old game. You could always e-mail them if your worried.