Real question, what's the harm here?
Are the modified Pokemon being used in competitions? What is the harm, really?
Are the modified Pokemon being used in competitions? What is the harm, really?
Even if they were, the penalty should be limited to being banned from future competitions, not prison.
I also think that east Asia thinks that esports are as important as normal sports, at least in the sense of exporting their culture. Everyone wants to be Hollywood or the NFL, and esports are their route to that kind of international renowned, or so they think. Thus, they have a bunch of laws to make sure nothing crops up that could impact that. Pokemon isn't an esport, but if you're 80, you don't know that.
As for this case, the prohibition on selling mod tools/services is certainly to protect the game manufacturers; if there's a perception that it's easy and safe to cheat in the game then players' incentive to spend (whether via microtransactions or future releases) goes way down, and so does the publisher's revenue, and so do tax receipts. I can't help noting that Japan's game industry isn't engaging in mass layoffs over the last few years, suggesting that maybe they know what they're doing.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2024/04/02/japan-no-ga...
No manufacturer wants their product utility diluted. After market modifications that add a benefit to the user don't make the product any worse for people without the modification. but in a product which is used by people to compete for social entertainment, modifications absolutely hurt the product because wins and losses are no longer a function of skill.
There is 0 chance whatever prohibition on selling mods had any impact on mass layoffs happening or not happening.
This seems like a stretch even under Japanese law, since the article gives the impression that he was not selling the cartridges themselves, but merely the service of taking cartridges and modifying them. But Japanese copyright law is kinda crazy. There's a reason that Japanese Wikipedia is almost totally bereft of images.
Interestingly, it's pretty much standard for competitive Pokemon players to use hacked Pokemon because of the crazy time investment the game demands to train Pokemon with optimal stats and movesets legitimately. They use free methods to do this though.