Removal Policy Allegedly Quietly Updated This Year
What do you think?
Will you keep using RHDN or RHDI?
Or will you use alternatives like RHP?
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Category: intellectual property
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Epic Clash Between Spriter and Repro-Cart Seller on FFIV Mod’s Discord Server
Spritework Offered for Sale Without Permission, Allegedly
For clymax’s projects, click here. You can also follow him on YouTube or Twitter.
December 2, 2025
Spriter: Am I seeing this right? Are you selling bootleg carts and including optional patches? First, get my name off of it, now. Second, many of those optional patches are my work, or include parts of my work, and, no, you are not allowed to sell them under any circumstance, in any form.
Spriter: [Seller] does not have the rights to sell or distribute the Final Fantasy IV ROM. [Seller] does not have permission to sell any of my work included in FFIV [Modification]’s optional patches. If you buy a reproduction cart from [Seller], you are purchasing an illegal product and stolen non-commercial fanart. I condemn the inclusion of my work and the use of my online handle on this eBay page.
Seller: I see, will remove
Also, be sure to send some cease and desist to this seller as well: [link redacted]
and this one: [link redacted]
there may be a few others
Spriter: Your eBay page still contains original art of mine, in addition to edited work. [3 artwork names redacted], most of the fonts.
Seller: [4 links redacted]
These all have them too
Spriter: I don’t speak for the main FFIV [Modification] project, I don’t speak for Square Enix. I don’t condone the sale of reproduction carts in general, and I don’t care to discuss creative, wrong interpretations of copyright law and enforcement. My concern is I do not want art that I created and especially not my name associated with your illegal bootlegs.
Moderator: this sounds like an excellent conversation to have in dms
Modification-Team Member A: Please leave it to the DMs guys.
If there’s something that involves someone else, please also DM them and handle it in private.
[Editor’s note: messages were deleted by Moderator]
Moderator: I am deleting the recent messages and WILL ban/kick if necessary. I, as a moderator, made a direct specific request to keep it to dms
if the dms themselves weren’t civil, there was no reason to bring it back into the public channels of this discord
[Editor’s note: Following this exchange, the Spriter was noted as no longer being in the Discord. It was not immediately clear whether the Spriter was booted from the Discord or left of his own accord.]
Modification-Team Member B: I was asked to remove some patches from the archive today in regards to a community member selling some physical copies of [Modification]. Any major combination of the existing patches in the archive are available in [Seller’s] storefront, so I was asked by a contributor to remove their content as they are not interested in this arrangement. If you also would like your patches removed from the public archive and the web patchers for any reason, now or in the future, let me know
What do you think? Do you side with the spriter or seller in this case? What’s your take on repro carts of mods in general? Comment below, or check us out on Discord.
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The “Stop Making Games” Initiative Must Be Stopped—and Here’s Why
Love Him or Hate Him, Pirate Software’s Jason “Thor” Hall was Right All Along
This is an opinion piece by clymax. It does not represent the opinions of FFV Central or of any other contributor or player of the FFVC community.
clymax is a romhacker and aspiring indie dev who has familiarity with IP in the realm of gaming. His flagship hacks include the Whirlwind mod for FFV and the Item Randomizer for The Battle of Olympus. You can follow clymax’s projects via FFVC or YouTube.
The “Stop Making Games” initiative has put forth a proposal that is highly destructive to prospects of future live service games being made.
Significantly, the proposal does not allow any off-ramp for live service games to exist in their current form.
Developers (and publishers) should have the right to design and honestly advertise a game as one that they can sunset at will for any reason or no reason.
Players should have the right to fully knowingly choose to play such games. That is, players should have the right to fully knowingly rent or license a game if they so choose.
Players should not have the right to deprive other players from types of games they willingly and fully knowingly play if they so choose.
That is, players should not have the right to stand in the way of other players when such players wish to rent or license a game.
Neither do they have the right to deprive developers from the right to design and honestly advertise a type of game they choose to make.
Just because certain players will not be paying customers should not mean that a game should be banned from the marketplace altogether.
The proposal, which effectively requires server binaries to be relinquished on sunsetting a game, with no off-ramp for a developer not to do so, deprives the live-service game developer of private property rights over the server binaries, such as copyright and trade secret, regardless of how the game is advertised.
As a result, developers ranging from indie to AAA would—and frankly, should—conceivably in many cases cancel or refrain from starting a live service project altogether.
What will this mean for consumer choice?
In the case of indie devs, one can imagine that in today’s competitive markerplace, in many cases they are sustained only by a passion for what they set out to make.
Having bureaucrats boss devs around in telling them what games they can make and how they must make such games: what do you think it does to that passion?
Do you think it would lead to more or better games being made?
Do you think it would lead to more people wanting to become devs?
As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
It is a grave mistake to evaluate a campaign based on its intent rather than its logical outcome.
Hence, this post names the campaign based on the latter and not the former.
If players want to see live service games with post-sunset plans for staying operational, the solution is to lower barriers to entry so that more of such games can be made and outcompete their sunsetting counterparts.
The solution is not to raise barriers to entry through more regulation, which also hurts indie devs disproportionately compared to AAA studios.
For a vibrant gaming landscape tomorrow with honestly advertised games that cater to the broadest range of gaming tastes, oppose the “Stop Making Games” initiative—at least in its current form as of this writing—until an off-ramp is put in place.
Otherwise, it will replace what we have today with an even bigger problem: certain games many of us would have loved, no longer being made.
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