Who here is RICH? Rich, rich, rich...

Most of us here are older in life and that means more chances to accrue wealth. Lots of wealth. How rich are you? Take this test:

1) You can stop working entirely and never have to worry about money problems for the rest of your life if you're careful with it.

Pretty good.

2) You can hire someone else to make you a ZC quest contoured to your directives. Ever envied someone else being able to make very nice quests? You asked them to make another quest but they said they wouldn't have the time for it. Not a problem, you can pay them for their time spent making the quest. Lets say the quest takes 500 hours to make and you pay them $30 an hour. So that's $15,000 for a ZC quest. $15,000 is nothing to you and you don't even think twice about spending.

You must be a multi-millionaire. Well done - only the rich appreciate art and can afford to pay for it. The poor would never even consider doing this - $15,000 for a game is a joke.

3) You can afford to pay to fix all of ZC's ails. That includes re-writing the whole engine. Making modular scripting. Advertise for more people to join the community. You know? The works. This might cost a few hundred thousand dollars.

Congratulations - you must a multi-billionaire. If you built most of the wealth yourself you have my respect and I salute you.

And yet ZC and ZQuest are both completely free. Probably because Nintendo would shut it down otherwise.

Its probably free because ZC and ZQuest are relatively cheap and easy to make. I mean, they replicate an old 80's game. Nintendo would only shut things down if content creators asked the masses to start paying for it. For example, asking for $20 a copy on steam. But how would Nintendo find out if some really rich person quietly sponsored a quest or ZC itself?

Exactly. It’s highly unlikely that Nintendo doesn’t know about ZC but since nobody is making money from it, they are willing to let it go.

On the other hand they shut down AM2R (a remake of Metroid II), which was also free, so who is to say.? Maybe they only did that because it was so nuch better than the real Metroid II.

Oh - Nintendo definitely knows about ZC. Someone dobbed ZC in a while back but Nintendo still kept quiet and did nothing. If you think about it from Nintendo's perspective, it can't just shutdown whatever fanmade project it wants. This would alienate its userbase and might lead to a consumer backlash. It will only do so if the project gets big enough to threaten its reputation.

I don't think it has anything to do with money - more the number of people involved in breaking copyright.

That makes sense. Shame about that Metroid game, though, I thought it had real promise.