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does nintendo have any comment on how their fun little mobile game is being used to kill people. that seems like something i would like to hear from them about

"umm nintendo doesn't own pokémon" thanks i am familiar with pokémon, but i think nintendo has its nose in it enough that they might not love the association with Actual War a good way to change things actually is to find someone sufficiently close to them who is sufficiently embarrassed by them!

The Pokémon Company International, which owns the licensing rights to the franchise as well as the domestic publishing rights to the Pokémon games, is in fact owned jointly by Nintendo and Game Freak. Nintendo does own Pokémon, so these people aren't even right.

I will say though, this may be somewhat out of Nintendo's hands at this point. Niantic used Pokémon Go data to train an AI model, and then partnered with a defense contractor to use that model to guide drones. That partnership was announced last December.

But Pokémon Go and Niantic's video game business were sold to Scopely in May of last year. So the Niantic that's doing this is essentially an independent spin-off created from Niantic's non-gaming business, which afaik Nintendo has no participation in (and no longer does business with Pokémon Go)

It's still fundamentally fucked that Pokémon Go user data was used to train a model at all though. Pokémon Go was always headed in this direction though because very obviously Niantic's business model was always to do fucked things with user data.