The three patents—all filed in Japan between May and July 2024—draw similarities between Palworld and 2022’s 2022’s Pokémon Legends: Arceus specifically. Their descriptions concern game mechanics like “riding an object” or throwing a ball to capture and possess a character in virtual spaces.
Wait…so the patents didn’t even exist when Palworld was released into EA? or am I missing something?
You’re not, but there’s a preexisting patent, and these three are basically extensions of that patent.
Essentially, Palworld needed to know what supplementary patents Nintendo was going to file in the future in Japan so they didn’t run afoul of the patent from the past. You know, textbook legal psychic stuff, really. /s
I hope Nintendo hurts itself in its confusion as its lawyers flail before the Japanese courts.
There was an article from years back, I want to say around 2019 or so on then-Gamasutra, about how it was already too late to stop the bubble from bursting because all of these games are trying to get everyone’s attention (I’m having trouble finding it now). Now the bubble is bursting, and big games these days have dev cycles of about 5 years, putting us right here in 2024. Get dev cycles to 3 years or less so that you can actually react to changing market conditions, and charge a fair price for a good product. Maybe sequel it or otherwise make regular old expansion DLC. That was sustainable. No one even makes a multiplayer game anymore unless it’s intended to be rigorously competitively balanced or suck up all of your time and money through grinding.
Get dev cycles to 3 years or less so that you can actually react to changing market conditions, and charge a fair price for a good product.
This industry’s already killing people with overwork and stress. Increasing the time pressure isn’t going to improve the quality or bring the price down.
We don’t need faster game development, there are already more games out there than anyone could play. We (the market) need to encourage quality over quantity.
The industry kept making games bigger that would have been better off if they’d stayed smaller. I’m not saying to make the games they make now in less time. I’m saying stop making games that take 5 years to make and instead make games that take 3 years to make.
You’ve described the AA/indie scene which took the chunk of the market big publishers abandoned including whole genres of games.
The problem is investors saw the line go way up, passing even Hollywood so to keep it riding forever they apply Hollywood-sized solutions.
Except you can’t just shuffle live services a few weeks around another so you can milk the box office. They want us to spend all our time in their game services so people will pick one game for a time so they are cannibalizing each other and eroding trust as games fail and abandon the players that did buy into them.
And what you’re describing is the economic realities of a bubble bursting, which means they have to pivot to making something sustainable that the market actually wants. That doesn’t mean AA or indie exclusively. It does mean smaller scope. Halo and Gears of War could be created much faster when they were linear games, and now they’re both open world and arguably worse off for it.
I suspect that Unreal 5 is going to make Epic so much money in the coming years. Taking 5% after the first million dollars doesn’t seem like a lot until you remember that the next Witcher and Cyberpunk are both Unreal 5 developments.
The next mainline Tomb Raider game is also going to be Unreal 5. That is if Embracer hasn’t bankrupted themselves or sold Edios/Crystal Dynamics before then (although I’d be thrilled if that happened).
They had one of the coolest games with a lot of faithful fans and they blew it all up by selling out to a shitty company that is focused on squeezing properties for more and more money.
Sadly emulation is seemingly non-existent for newer consoles like PS4 and Xbox one (PS3 is pretty emulatable but fairly demanding, Xbox 360 emulation is last I checked still pretty poor) Luckily most of the games on newer consoles are released on PC.
I remember ps3 emulation a few years ago was determined too hardware intensive, nowadays it can be done on mid level hardware. PS4 and Xbox One is going to happen, just depends on when.
Yep. The PS4 and Xbone are both very close to off-the-shelf AMD APU’s as far as I remember; you could buy very similar processors for desktop use. Emulation would require a ton more power than the original chips, and the original chips are so close to desktop processors that it’s more efficient and feasible to reverse-engineer the proprietary API’s those console chips use.
We always hear about shit companies like embracer, but who are the actual people in charge? Who are the people who are very bad at their jobs and should be publically ostracized for damaging not only their ips but the lives of hundreds to thousands of working developers? Like what are their names? Who are these faceless scumbags?
Embracer is just a name to hide behind, the people involved in the decisionmaking here should be known by name, like Bobby “incredible piece of human filth” Kotick
I honestly do believe Lars Wingefors is passionate about games and the industry, he’s been trying to find a place in it his whole career, but I do not think he’s a good business man nor worthy of stewardship for these IPs.
Very well could be. I didn’t research their backgrounds. I just know from first hand experience of people who get jobs who graduated with business degrees who don’t care about the stuff they sell.
they would have done these layoffs regardless for what it’s worth. Apples privacy stance for advertising companies (what unity wanted to be) and the lack of easy access to additional investment this past year meant that it’s not been a sustainable business for a while
While Epic has been pouring money from Fortnite into Unreal Engine and making significant progress in updating the engine.
Unity has been sitting on its ass for years doing absolutely nothing in the way of R&D.
As a result, Unity is now left behind.
Valve has given up on being an Engine developer.
Epic with the Unreal Engine will have a monopoly soon if it doesn't already.
Anyone attempting to make their own modern game engine these days are way behind the ball. All the big players are switching to Unreal.
And it's not only Game Engine, but movie making engine as well.
The only company I could see that would have the $$$ and talent to compete against Epic for a Graphics Engine would be nVidia.
AMD doesn't have the R&D and Scientists specializing in Graphics/Physics/Rendering/Simulation/InformationLoading like nVidia does.
Valve has the $$$ and talent, but they are focused on hardware now, and are even farther behind than Unity.
Having a single Game Engine monopoly will be bad for all of us in the end.
The only Video Game engine that I could see someone develop that could compete against Unreal, is if the engine was built from the ground up 100% focused on anti-cheat. Libraries that are designed from the start to be multiplayer focused with un-necessary data scrubbed properly from the clients so they can't sniff out data. Something designed to be hack proof.
That game engine, even if not graphically intense would be highly sought after in a wide genre range of games.
…which is why Godot now is quickly slipping into the niche that Unity largely used to be for.
And since Godot is FOSS, there is no going back for Unity once Indie game devs have shifted, since - like with Blender being free to use - it destroys the competition by becoming the defacto king when it comes to things like video tutorials on places like YouTube.
Popular tutorial channels on YouTube know their viewer audience is less likely to be large enough to be profitable via ad revenue, premium subscriptions, etc. if they are limited niche of people only willing to pay thousands for a license to an application they don’t yet have any professional reason to pay for.
Being open source in any way also usually then leads to a snowball effect of an application gaining popularity and then people extending its functionality.
This is also what I think will soon happen to Plex with Jellyfin since the Plex bigwigs have decided they want to be Netflix more than people’s personal media server frontend.
All it will take is one big mistake and the ground will fall beneath their feet just like with Unity.
All fascinating and frustrating to watch as I used to work with Unity a ton since its early days.
Never really thought about the popularity of FOSS starting with youtube-tutorials. But completely reasonable that when everybody starts with Godot (or other FOSS like Blender), even bigger Studios might just use that one since there are just more guys already proficient with it.
Students and amateurs want to learn how to do something. Their choices are either - (sometimes) get an EDU address, fill out a form, apply for a discount or free version, see the watermark or lose a ton of functionality, and only see tutorials via classes or other a-la-carte method (how many folks are doing Houdini lessons online out there - probably not many if I had to guess considering Houdini’s price), or start paying $20/month for a program that they someday hope will allow them to earn money - knowing that if they stop paying, they lose access to files… OR…
They can download a program for free, that anyone can add stuff to, with thousands of really well done tutorials online on free places like YouTube, that studios will love because there’s no licensing fee or if there is - it’s only when they are really profitable or whatever.
The more that people use it, the more there are people doing tutorials, expanding functionality, etc.
Blender used to be garbage in like 2010, but now - you’d be an idiot not to grab a copy and teach yourself if you used to regular in apps like 3DS Max, Maya, or other premium closed application now requiring a bunch of DRM installers, license tiers, and subscriptions…
Same goes for Adobe’s stuff. I imagine there are more and more people sick of Creative Cloud’s garbage and are ready to find and learn and contribute to FOSS services… All that needs to happen is critical stupid event by bigwig, and suddenly a mass exodus begins.
This is also why languages like R and Python are supplanting SPSS and Matlab. Open source is just better in some ways, particularly once it gets over the initial usability barrier, which Jellyfin seems to now be achieving.
Hello I work for Unity (for now lol, we’ll see)! I’d like to just say from my end of things we do actually do a solid amount of R&D. Just that a depressing amount of it either never sees the light of day, takes so long to release it has already been done better by someone else, or is unannounced with little to no documentation on release so it never gets visibility. The other thing to note is that Unity does a lot of non-game things that might not be that noticeable if you’re just looking at it from a game making perspective, like our publicly known contracts we have to help train the military to “totally not kill people you guys”!
this is on-top of all the lost sales from no one buying their first-party games.
Gamepass is not financially viable, it’s funded by microsoft office and azure. It never will be unless they get a huge majority of the market /and/ raise praises massively. Which is of course their goal as soon as they kill the concept of game ownership.
Yup, it’s obvious once you connect everything why Microsoft is doing this. They’re monopolizing the game market - and most gamers couldn’t be more excited. When I was on Reddit I called out how competition was good and this was bad and was always met with the majority of people saying “nuh uh, they’re going to put them all on game pass for only $9 a month!”
Netflix at least didn’t plan to be what it became from the start, they even experimented with releasing some of its originals on Blu-ray for a bit. But when every shitty heavy hitter in the entertainment industry comes after you, you’re gonna learn to be shitty real fast.
Microsoft is a whole different brand of monster. They have a long, long history of terrible anti-competitve practices, fucking over their own consumers, flagrantly ignoring complaints, and making deeply underhanded moves. In many different markets, for decades. The Xbox One release was almost literally a thesis statement. They could not possibly have broadcast any clearer who the fuck they are and what the goal is.
And still, still, people defend them. They downplay everything and fall head over heels for their marketing bullshit.
That’s why we’re truly fucked without regulations. It’s not just because corporations are terrible and will do incredibly underhanded shit at the drop of a hat to raise profits, it’s also because the vast majority of the consumer base is fucking stupid. Incapable of pattern recognition and imagination, and unwilling to change their patterns even slightly. It’s really, really, really easy to see the negative effects of a Microsoft dominated gaming market. And the consumers can’t see it.
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