‘Not comfortable’: Nintendo’s wrath scares Nexus Mods out of hosting Palworld Pokémon mods

It only took three days for Palworld to get a running Pokémon mod and it looked incredible, but the patched mod has since disappeared, with hosting site Nexus Mods declaring it doesn’t want to draw the wrath of Nintendo down for any reason.

Nexus Mods, the most popular mod site on the net, today quite bluntly confirmed it won’t ever be hosting any Palworld mods that infringe on IP, including Pokémon. Speaking to PCGamesN, Nexus Mods community lead Mathew Elliott explained that despite seeing the novelty of such a mod, the site won’t host anything that adds Pokémon creatures or characters to Palworld.

“We’re not comfortable hosting this content,” Elliott admitted today. “Nintendo has a consistent record of mercilessly submitting legal challenges, DMCAs, and takedowns against fan-made content. Given Palworld’s similarity to the Pokemon franchise as a base game, hosting content that adds copyrighted characters or assets into the game is almost certainly going to put us at risk of legal action.”

This shouldn’t be any shock given the footage of this mod from its creator, ToastedShoes, was removed from both X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube for breaching copyright. As a result, while the hope is for this mod to be released to the wider public, ToastedShoes says they are “treading lightly” after receiving a DMCA from Nintendo.

From the perspective of Nexus Mods, the team doesn’t think it’s worth the risk of hosting such mods at all. “At best, we would have to deal with the headache of DMCA/legal threats from Nintendo, and at worst they may seek to take action against us and uploaders of the mods directly.”

This isn’t just bad news for Pokémon fans either, because the way Nexus Mods plans to handle this would imply they won’t be hosting any mods that add existing IP to the game, whether that be from Nintendo or otherwise. The mods site is hosting several Digimon mods that look great, so perhaps those will be hit with next. Let’s hope not.

Palworld is still in its early stages and there is a lot of time for mods to be crafted that don’t use IP and are completely original, so we’re excited to see what players come up with next.