Summary
Over the last few months, corporate giants have seemingly been keen to tighten their grip on their IPs. Last year,Nintendo’slawyersstarted the process of suing Palworld developers Pocketpairfor ‘copyright infringement’, and last week,Valvesuddenlyshuttered a fan remake of the original Counter-Strike gameafter eight years of work.
Now, in a similar move, Lego has gone after another project that has been in development for eight years, this time based on its Bionicle property.
Bionicle: Masks Of Power Shut Down Due To Lego’s “Stance On Fan-Created Media” Changing
Less than three months before Team Kanohi was set to publish Bionicle: Masks of Power’s first demo, it received awful news: “The LEGO Group has asked our team to shut down our project in its entirety and remove BIONICLE: Masks of Power from the public eye,” said Team Kanohi in apassionate message.
“Bionicle: Masks of Power has been in development for over eight years. During that entire time, we’ve made an effort to ensure our project was in good standing with the LEGO Group, carefully following the LEGO Group’s Fair Play guidelines. We have never charged our fans a single cent for the game’s development, and have put disclaimers that clearly label our project as fan-made on our website, Steam page, and every trailer for the game. The LEGO Group has even publicly endorsed similar fan-made games, such as Bionicle: Quest for Mata Nui, on their officialBits N’ Bricks Podcast,” it said. “Unfortunately, it seems like the LEGO Group’s stance on fan-created media has changed. While we can only speculate as to the exact reason why they have asked us to remove the game at this time, what we suspect is that our project was too easy to mistake for an official product.”
The news is even more shocking, as reportedly, the Masks of Power team met with Lego, who in turn, gave them permission to carry on the project.
The LEGO Group has even publicly endorsed similar fan-made games, such as Bionicle: Quest for Mata Nui, on their official Bits N’ Bricks Podcast.
According to the game’sYouTube channel, dozens ofdevelopershave volunteered their free time over the last eight years to help create Masks of Power, butnow, their work is for nothing. This included programmers, a QA department, an art team, and voice actors.
While the news is likely heartbreaking for the developers at Team Kanohi, they’ve taken the news in their stride, vowing to “take everything we’ve learned through creating Masks of Power and using that knowledge and experience as the foundation of a brand-new, original game.”
We’ve reached out to Team Kanohi and Lego for comment.
