Relic Castle: Popular Pokémon fan site to shut after takedown notice

A popular Pokémon fan gaming site, Relic Castle will be forced to close after a takedown notice was filed.

The Digital Millennium Copyright (DCMA) notice was filed by a third party on behalf of the Pokémon Company and Relic Castle would use several social media accounts to convey the news to fans. Relic Castle posted on X on Thursday:

♥ pic.twitter.com/4oW0whJncL

— Relic Castle (@RelicCastleCom) March 21, 2024

Has the Pokémon Company filed a takedown notice?

In a post shared to Reddit and Discord, the owner and manager of Relic Castle would post several items to inform fans of the site about the decisions taken. The message was posted with the comments locked and one of the Relic Castle’s moderators was firm in this decision to keep the messages around the news above board, saying:

“The community will need to wait a few days (at minimum) to see what happens next. After some time has passed, and more info has been gathered, we may open the topic up for public discussion. Yes, we are controlling the discussion in our community, as is our right as its leaders. We’re not interested in being a place that hosts toxicity and spreads misinformation. As we stated above, Everything we know is detailed here, so if you have questions that aren’t answered, there’s probably no one who can answer them (at least right now)

Relic Castle’s guardians said, “TPCI (The Pokémon Company International) should not be contacted, as it was a third party who is authorized by TPCI to supply DMCAs and looks legitimate.”

The moderator of the Reddit post would conclude by saying “Please be patient, and rest assured that the Pokémon fan game community is not going anywhere. This kind of thing happens and is ultimately inevitable. But it is not indicative of a massive crusade against fan games. Nor does it mean RC has gone away entirely and/or forever.”

What was Relic Castle?

The site was a forum for fan-made Pokémon content that boasted 20,000 members and 65,000 posts across a 10 year history. This nexus to chat and share content will now be forced to close, but the Discord community will “not going anywhere and the site is still visible as an archive using the Wayback Machine.”

The custodians of the Relic Castle would say at the base of the post “What will RC staff do next? Is there a new site, or will the discord be expanded? A: We don’t know right now. Put love into the world today.”