Elious, the creator behind the popular Pokémon nature documentary YouTube series PokéNational Geographic, says that his channel will be deleted by YouTube in seven days due to a series of sudden and aggressive copyright strikes from Nintendo of America.
In a video posted to an alternate channel, Elious says that Nintendo of America suddenly issued numerous strikes on large batches of his videos, all in the space of 12 hours. At the time he posted the video, a total of 20 videos had been caught up in four separate copyright strikes which encompass the entirety of the videos. With YouTube’s three-strikes policy, this means his channel is now pending deletion by YouTube and will disappear in seven days.
Elious says the strikes claim his channel is inappropriately using “content used in Pokémon video games including audiovisual works, characters, and imagery.” Elious’ videos consist of original 3D animation of various Pokémon in the “wild,” with a David Attenborough–style narration sharing various facts about Pokémon like Magikarp, Squirtle, Magnemite, Snom, Mew, Charizard, and more. He has been producing these videos on this channel since as far back as 2023 without issue, and claims in his video that the only actual content he took directly from the games was “tiny sprite roars” that last less than three seconds, adding that numerous other Pokémon creators on YouTube, as well as AI-produced channels mimicking his own, use images or footage directly from the games with no issue.
Notably, Elious launched a Patreon just two months ago to enable fans to support the series financially. The Patreon page is currently “under review.”
Elious continues by saying that he isn’t opposed to just deleting all the Pokémon videos if Nintendo of America asks, but he wishes he could keep his nearly 100,000 subscribers so he can keep making videos of other things, as he has on the channel in the past.
“I can’t really fight this,” Elious says. “It all seems legitimate, it does seem to come from the actual, real Nintendo of America. I can’t fight this. I don’t…I don’t know what to do about it because it’ll remove everything. I’m downloading stuff, of course, I have like, all the videos myself. But I’ll never be able to post them again, and I’ll never be able to use this channel again. Almost 100,000 subscribers over three years of making these animations and it’s all going to be gone in seven days.”
Elious says he will continue to make videos under his new channel, EliousEntertainmentYT, but they won’t be Pokémon-related. A number of clips from his videos remain up on his TikTok page.
“PokéNational is dead. I’m not going to be able to make PokéNational again.”