@emblem Project M is a gameplay mod of Super Smash Bros. Brawl to make it more like Melee.

Essentially, Nintendo told Twitch they wouldn't support streaming Nintendo games anymore if Twitch continued to let Project M be streamed on there. It was growing in popularity and this was I think right around the time that Smash 4 came out. The Project M dev team (actually, just the two head members) was told this by Twitch and so they shut down the project entirely, apparently after being in talks with a lawyer who said that they *could* get in legal trouble if they didn't completely stop development.

For a very long time, those two head members were completely silent on exactly why the mod stopped development. I'm pretty sure neither of them actually ever revealed the truth; it was found out through the grapevine eventually. For a very long time, the general consensus was that it was hit with a cease and desist by Nintendo. I was skeptical of this claim for a while, though, because as more projects started getting taken down by Nintendo there was always something verifiably illegal about them, like using assets from Nintendo games or distributing ROMs alongside the mods themselves instead of just patch files. Project M never did that kind of stuff. It was just a bunch of mod files. There was also the issue I noticed where every other project that had received a C&D or a DMCA takedown was more than happy to share exactly what had happened, but the PM guys were super hush-hush about it. They then went on to make their own game which tanked hard and is now something completely different and owned by a separate studio.

I wish that there was a lot more transparency during that whole case. Those PM leaders never told the rest of the dev team for the closure and even tried to scare off a future project (Legacy TE) from doing anything, based on that one talk with a lawyer from way back when. Now, Project+ is going strong and there is zero pushback from Nintendo whatsoever still, the only real issue being tournaments, but that's been a problem even for Melee, even in an unmodded state. If you have heard of the whole VGBootCamp/Panda debacle, there's a reason why the Smash community had so much animosity toward Panda for trying to get in Nintendo's pocket, because Nintendo has historically not been kind to the Smash scene, whether that is with Melee or Project M, and even if what they do has no legal basis, nobody is willing to fight it because it's Nintendo.

I have wondered for a while if Project NX, a similar mod but for Smash Ultimate, actually received a legitimate C&D or not for a while now. The project wasn't public and was only being developed as a fun little project, not ever meant to go nearly as far as Project M did. No files were ever available, and the only way you could feasibly get your hands on it was by meeting the dev at a tournament and letting him copy files over to your Switch. Something about that just seems fishy to me, especially in the wake of a place like GameBanana where so many Ultimate mods (and other Nintendo game mods) exist and have for a while. You'd think Nintendo would be quite privy to that and shut it all down too. On top of that, one of the devs for Project NX actually just immediately started working on his own mod called HDR (HewDraw Remix) and that is now by far the biggest Ultimate mod, going even beyond what Project M was able to accomplish from a programming perspective in some ways. Radio silence from Nintendo. There have been tournaments for it and everything.

So yeah basically, when it comes to scummy stuff regarding Nintendo, they often become a bit of a scapegoat imo. Take the whole situation with Gary Bowser, the hacker and founder of Team Xecuter, who served jail time and is now required to give Nintendo money for basically the rest of his life. People were like, "man Nintendo is so fucking horrible for ruining this guy's life just for hacking the console!" In reality, this dude is a major scumbag who pushed code that bricked people's 3DS systems and ran a PAID PIRATING SERVICE for Nintendo games. Nintendo didn't even decide the fine or the punishment, that was on the court. All Nintendo did was try to get him in trouble for fucking around with their ecosystem too much, but this story was heavily sensationalized to make Nintendo out to be the bad guys because a lot of people don't know of Team Xecuter's scummy history but do know "Nintendo bad."