Bandai Namco Issues Takedown Notice to Popular Tekken Modding Website

Bandai Namco is drawing the ire of the fighting game community once again.

No more than a month after taking down videos of Tekken 8 mods on YouTube, Bandai Namco’s legal team has sent a notice of infringement to the people behind TekkenMods.com.

Dennis Stanistan, the site’s administrator, shared the screenshot of Bandai Namco’s email on his official Twitter account.

At first glance, it may seem like Bandai wants the website to remove all Tekken-related images and logos because it doesn’t want to be associated with the website. But, upon further reading, it appears Bandai is only taking issue with one mod that adds an inaccessible in-game model into Tekken 8.

This one notice is specifically about “Devil Reina”.

Reina is one of the newest characters to be added to the Tekken fighting roster. She was introduced in Tekken 8, which was released on January 26, 2024. She claims to be the daughter of the late Heihachi Mishima, the franchise’s former overarching antagonist. This means that she’s the half-sister of Kazuya Mishima and the aunt of Jin Kazama. However, much of her story remains a mystery, possibly on purpose.

By making the “Devil Reina” character accessible to players, the modders are presumably spoiling planned content for Tekken 8. Hence, the takedown notice.

Bandai Namco Is On A DMCA Striking Spree

Unfortunately, defending Bandai for wanting to hide premium or future content becomes a lot more difficult when you consider that this isn’t an isolated incident.

This particular user detailed how Bandai is strong-arming content creators to remove any content with Tekken mods from their YouTube and Twitter accounts. The company has also exercised its influence to get community-run social media handles locked for talking about mods. Finally, YouTubers posting Tekken-related content found their channels deleted for posting videos that featured mods.

The worst part, as per the Tekken community, is that Bandai has started targeting Tekken 7 mods now that Tekken 8 is out. This reaction comes after years of silence with the series director Katsuhiro Harada even going as far as to say on Twitter that his only problem is that “people misunderstand [mods] as official and ask [the development team] to support the problems it causes.”

This reply came after Harada’s lighthearted response to an Elden Ring mod in Tekken 7 that went viral two years ago.

Bandai Namco owns the copyright to everything Tekken. They have every right to go after mods. The only reason why Tekken mods remained available for a long time is because Bandai left them alone. But, now that mods have become an integral part of Tekken and the larger fighting game community, the expected backlash will only get worse.

Already, Tekken 8 is being review-bombed on Steam over its monetization practices.

It will be interesting to see if Bandai will backtrack with their takedown notices against an angered Tekken modding or if it will go full Nintendo and never look back.