My concern with my post was that the Gamefreak staff are no less artists than fans that create fakemons. So, if people take the official work and use it without permission why would a fakemon artists be offended or surprised if a fakemon they add to fangame etc. gets used without permission? I think, ironically, that someone using your work without permission is, in a way, a mark of that work's greatness as no one would not care about it if it wasn't any good - it's not of course respectful towards the artist to act against his/hers will, but still...
And so what if Gamefreak staff is paid for their work? Is, for example, Kenji Sugimori's work with creating all the 800+ original pokemon designs - which we all love and are inspired by - over the course of 20 or so years, less valuable because he got paid for it? It doesn't matter if he agreed to effectively sell his rights to the work by doing it for the company; it is simply what he, as an artist, agreed to do - it is his terms of use.
However, if his and Gamefreak's, for which he worked for, wishes are not heeded regarding the use of the official work, then again why a fakemon artist - or creator of any fan content - would try to, as someone said, horde all the work for him/herself? Yes, your work is dear to you and you don't want it to be misused, but I'm pretty sure that the official artist and rest of the Gamefreak staff feel the same way.
Simply put, it's not fair to use someone's work without permission or affiliate with a project doing it and then demand the very rights to yourself that you took away or helped took away from someone.
I know it's tricky; we all would like to build on what we grew up with, but we will likely never get permission for it. I was also interested to make fangame with fakemons and all of my own, but in the end I could not find honest way to do it and respect the wishes of those people who gave all these good childhood memories. So, I dropped it and started to sough ways make completely original game idea which was still "inspired" by pokemon - I just wish more people would do it this way. All those great fakemons for example could be creatures of their own right in a world where there is no conflict with an existing IP...
Z-nogyroP said:
calling fakemon, sprites, etc "tiny input" or "trivial" is kind of insulting given how much effort people put into creating them. yeah, it's nothing compared to all the programming going into the base roms, but we're also not a multimillion-dollar company.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to insult anyone :( I just made a point: something that single fan adds to fangame is small compared to the pokemon franchise/phenomenom as whole (i.e not fakemons compared to rom hacking).