Popular speedrunner has Mario Maker levels wiped by Nintendo

Nintendo’s turbulent relationship with the online games community continues to fumble along.

Kotaku reports that the platform holder has seen fit to wipe clean all of the Mario Maker levels created by speedrunner David ‘GrandPOObear’ Hunt.

Streaming Mario Maker is 90 per cent of my stream, which is 90 per cent of my overall income so far in 2016,” Hunt added.

Nintendo has been irritating much of the Mario maker community thanks to what appear to be its random level deletions. And of course all this follows its run-ins with YouTubers last year.

Part of the issue is the lack of transparency. Creators are often left with no explanation for the data wipe. And since the levels themselves cannot be manually retrieved, creators are left with the choice of either accepting their fate or spending time re-creating and re-uploading their levels without knowing for certain whether they will be culled again a second time.

Hunt has even documented his exchange with Nintendo customer support, which failed to shed any light on the situation other than confirming his content had not been flagged for cheating or anything else of note.

However, with other users being able to flag up levels they feel are problematic, it is feared that abuse of the system between competing streamers can be a problem.

Hunt has had levels removed before, and has yet to receive a concrete answer as to why. Once it was suggested to him that the issue may be the use of the word ‘poo’ in the title of one of his creations. He even offered to change it, but was told that the way Nintendo’s systems work mean that levels are either restored in their entirety, as was, or not at all.

He was even at one stage phoned up by customer support mid-stream to say that one of his levels would be returned – although this never actually happened.

This hurts, in some ways, my standing in the community,” he added. [Making] me just looking unaccomplished, etc. I know that stuff is silly, but that’s the economy we live in as streamers.”