Overlord Disney Finally Shuts Down Fandom-Led Club Penguin Rewritten After Years of Service

Disney has finally decided to shut down community-driven Club Penguin Rewritten, which wasn't a pleasant experience for players watching their bright-colored penguins and virtual world disappear in the blink of an eye. Also, the City of London Police has total control of the game's official website and even arrested a few people in the process.

Club Penguin Rewritten had over 140,000 users on their Discord server before everything happened and now is reduced to a single comment from a known administrator of the game. They stated that "CPRewritten is shutting down effective immediately due to a full request by Disney," to which they added that "[they] have voluntarily given control over the website to the police for them to continue their copyright investigation."

Their statement checks out when comapred to standard Disney behavior over dead IPs since back in 2020 (thanks BBC), they closed down Club Penguin Online, which had over a million players during the pandemic, yet had some egregious problems when it came to racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic comments from players in the chat.

as of within 10 minutes ago, looks like Disney had Club Penguin Rewritten shut down immediately. it sucks, but hopefully the community can still stick together. few images of mine showing just that pic.twitter.com/UomD37Wlk1

— HomeByMidnight (@Cozyhoodies) April 13, 2022

Much of that escaped the latest remake iteration, Club Penguin Rewritten, as this takedown was more about IP theft than Disney attached to a bleak online community. However, the escalation of three people getting arrested by the City of London Police feels like Disney is cracking down even harder on the successfully maintained remakes. As reported by TechCrunch, we also learned that Detective Constable Daryl Fryatt with the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit from the City of London Police told the outlet more about their investigation:

“Following a complaint under copyright law, PIPCU [has] seized a gaming website as part of an ongoing investigation into the site. Three people were arrested on April 12 on suspicion of distributing materials infringing copyright and searches were carried out. They have been released under investigation and to aid with the police investigation, they agreed to sign over the website to the control of PIPCU.”

At the end of it all, the death of Club Penguin Rewritten is a threatening message to all fandom games wanting to amass players. In light of all the news, the Rewritten community hopes to stay together online and is hopeful about finding ways to interact with each other.

You can view the full report on TechCrunch here.