Nicalis demanded to remove the fan versions of the Cave Story metroidvania — they violate the publisher's copyright

Developers of fan games for free Cave Story are forced to curtail their work. Nicalis, the publisher of Metroidvania’s paid ports, accused these projects of copyright infringement.

Cave Story was released back in 2004. Its sole creator was Daisuke Amaya, who released the game for free for PC. However, six years later Nicalis agreed with the developer and ported the title to WiiWare and DSWare. Later, the publisher also released Cave Story 3D for 3DS and Cave Story+ for PC and Switch. All versions from Nicalis were distributed for money, but the original Cave Story remained free.

Over the years, fans have managed to decompile Cave Story and make their own projects based on it. In particular, Cave Story Engine 2 was launched — a fork with which you can create new versions of this metroidvania.

However, at the end of last week, the CSE 2 repository on GitHub was closed because it allegedly contained the Cave Story+ code belonging to Nicalis. But the project developers claim that this code was not there and is not.

Now the owners of CSE 2 plan to contact Nicalis and peacefully discuss the problem. According to them, the publisher had not previously objected to mods for Cave Story, and everything that happened was nothing more than a misunderstanding.

Nevertheless, the network has already appeared condemnations of Nicalis’ actions and calls not to purchase their versions of the title. For example, such a statement was published by indie developer Rami Ismail.

Note that this is not the first time that Nicalis closes fan projects on Cave Story. In October 2019, the company opposed the port of the game on Xbox One. Then the publisher was not satisfied with the use of intellectual property: the name “Cave Story”, the title logo, its plot, characters, illustrations, music and packaging design.

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