Fan-project Pokemon Uranium has finally seen a release after nine years of development within the RPG Maker XP.

The unfortunate news to their massive achievement to making a completely new game within the monster-battling RPG series is that they’ve been notified of repeated take down notices for the project.

Now, the team has obliged by removing all download links to the game, despite having the project downloaded over 1.5 million times. While the team wasn’t contacted by Nintendo directly, they’re not taking any chances.

Here’s the entire statement from the team:

After receiving more than 1,500,000 downloads of our game, we have been notified of multiple takedown notices from lawyers representing Nintendo of America.

While we have not personally been contacted, it’s clear what their wishes are, and we respect those wishes deeply.

Therefore, we will no longer provide official download links for the game through our website.

We have no connection to fans who reupload the game files to their own hosts, and we cannot verify that those download links are all legitimate. We advise you to be extremely cautious about downloading the game from unofficial sources.

We are blown away by the response this game has received, and we thank you all so much for your outstanding support.

We will continue to provide Pokémon Uranium-related news and updates through our official channels.

You are welcome to continue discussing and sharing content related to the game on our forums and Discord, where there is a very active community.

Thank you for reading, and let’s share the love of Pokémon!

Fan-made Nintendo projects being shut down by the intellectual property holder seem to be all the rage these days, with the AM2R Metroid 2 remake being recently shut down.

How do you guys feel about ambitious fan projects like Pokemon Uranium and AM2R being shut down? Sound off in the comments below!

Editor’s Note: The article originally posed the debacle as if Nintendo was actually shutting the project down – while the team supposedly received cease and desist letters, they personally chose to remove downloads themselves.