This shouldn’t come as a surprise
The competition for Best Fan Creation at The Game Awards 2016 has suddenly been halved. Without any explanation, the nominee pool has been whittled down from four to two titles. But, it’s not too tough to infer what probably happened.
Pokemon Uranium and Project AM2R have been taken off The Game Awards’ site as nominees for Best Fan Creation. What’s notable about these titles is that they’re both based on Nintendo properties. Additionally, they were both the victims of cease and desists by Nintendo earlier this year. Nintendo is a sponsor of this year’s Game Awards.
Neither The Game Awards nor Nintendo has yet commented on the disappearance of these two fan games. Nintendo has historically been ardently committed to protecting its properties through whatever means necessary. It makes sense that it wouldn’t want to give these two titles global exposure through a highly viewed awards show — especially when it just released a new Pokemon game that it’s trying to sell.
So, we’re left with half the fan games to choose from. Brutal Doom 64 and Enderal: The Shards of Order are the surviving nominees. We don’t know which of those two will win; we just know that the ones based on Nintendo properties won’t even get the chance to take home the hardware.
2016 Nominees [The Game Awards via NeoGAF]
