‘American gamers must return to buying American for their gaming needs. That’s why I have talked to Microsoft and they will lower their prices considerably. You are welcome, nerds.’ -DT, probably soon
It ain’t gonna cost me shit because I’m spending next to nothing for the foreseeable future apart from necessities, and what little I do spend is gonna be bought as locally as possible. Fuck this country.
I know of brothers creating Aldi North and Aldi South, at least here in Germany (Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd). I wasn’t aware of the history of Lidl being a direct competitor to Aldi. Just looked up on Wikipedia for quick reference.
Nope. Aldi was created by brothers who, after pioneering the discounter model and being quite successful with their stores, broke apart their empire over a disagreement – which was whether selling cigarettes was a good idea, in particular whether the theft rate would be too high. Completely fucking un-dramatic (very much in contrast to Puma/Adidas which is a feud that’s still going on), they always cooperated a lot in procurement etc, and definitely don’t compete with each other: The world is split into Aldi North and Aldi South, referring to their territories in Germany. The only other country where both are present is in the US because Aldi North bought Trader Joes, ages ago, it’s the only country where they’re technically competing but not really because they’re serving quite different market segments. Aldi South (under the Aldi brand) has been in the US for ages too, btw, but mostly kept a low profile. They both like to grow organically, no flashy fancy billion buck investments. In Aldi North stores at least in Germany Trader Joe’s is the store brand for nuts, dried fruits etc.
The two Albrechts got into the business because their father, a learned baker, got ill with baker’s asthma and turned to bread trading instead, they expanded the product range of the business, after the war focussed heavily on high throughput on low margins and opened more locations, then introduced the supermarket model in Germany. Even in Germany it took some people quite a while that their quality was never shabby, on the contrary, but combine their low prices with the back then right-out warehouse atmosphere and you definitely didn’t see rich people there.
Lidl is wholly separate and not founded by brothers. It technically predates Aldi and also the brother’s expansion before the split and rebrand (they were known as Albrecht Discount before), it was a small fruit trader which then got bought by Joseph Schwarz, then turned into a larger but still regional fruit trader. Lidl stores as we know them only go back to the 1970s when Dieter, son of Joseph, was already at the helm.
Lidl is much more common outside of Germany than inside, though, long story short establishing yourself as a hard discounter in a market where Aldi is already present is hard. They did make Aldi turn away from the warehouse aesthetic, though, yes you can have nice signage and lighting and stiff be efficient.
And this is why commercial social media and the overarching idea that violence is a good way to solve most problems are both bad ideas.
It says something that folks reach for that instead of learning how to be calm about such things and tend to be supported for such behaviour instead of told it’s not a good idea, even worse that they never take such things down once posted, often.
All part of the patriarchal, oversharing that the internet loves.
“Be happy, be horny, be bursting with rage, we’ve got a million different ways to engage”. -Bo Burnham
We had a history before patents/copyright were enforced. It was pretty brutal for anyone trying to make a living with their creations. Take a look and see if you want to return to that.
yeah now its brutal for anyone trying to make a living and excellent for anyone who already inherited a living and has more money than they could use in multiple lifetimes. I’d hate to go back to when it was just brutal for anyone trying to make a living.
Imagine if any company could just copy an indie game and scale it up/polish a bit and get all the sales.
You’re describing the entire mobile games industry. You think all those top apps in the app stores are 100% original? No. They copied other games.
Also, patents have nothing to do with that. Software is covered by copyright.
Furthermore, “back in the day” manufacturing was expensive and required huge factories to build stuff (in quantity). The barrier to entry was enormous! People were mostly uneducated and there was not much in the way of “shared engineering knowledge”. Ten thousand people could look at a car engine and have no friggin clue how it worked. That’s why patents were necessary: Disclosure
These days disclosure has become irrelevant. Any engineer can look at an invention or product and figure out both how it works and how it was made. At the very least, they can figure out a way to make it. Just look at all the Youtube channels where every day people are making complicated machines, parts, and electronics! The mysteries are gone. Disclosure is unnecessary.
Since the entire point of patents was disclosure why do we still need them?
So you’re cool if some other developer makes a knockoff of Palworld and sells it, right? Cause that knock off developer has to make a living, right? Where’s your empathy lie? With the Palworld developer or the knock off?
I don’t need to come up with any revolutionary ideas, the open source folks are already creating without patenting their creations
Here’s a revolutionary idea: universal basic income. No need to prevent other people from monetizing your idea if you don’t need to monetize your idea in the first place
I don’t need to come up with any revolutionary ideas, the open source folks are already creating without patenting their creations
The largest contributors to Open Source make their money from patents and other IP. As in, they can afford to give away lots of time and effort because they make their money with IP. If IP were to be eradicated as you’re proposing, all those contributions to Open Source by those largest contributors would evaporate. Here’s the largest Open Source contributors from 2017-2020.
The largest contributors to Open Source make their money from patents and other IP.
The data in that video is (probably) accurate but your statement is completely wrong: In that list only Intel makes anything but trivial amounts of money from patents. In fact, Microsoft, Google, and Docker have famouslylost shittons of money thanks to patents. They basically siphoned money out of those companies into the pockets of lawyers and provided absolutely no benefit to society.
For fuck’s sake: Features were removed from Android because of software patents!
Not only that but Google makes almost all of its money from advertising, not “IP”. Same for Meta which is oddly missing from the graph (even though they contribute to and maintain a ton of FOSS stuff).
Then let’s talk about #1: Redhat. They absolutely would be 1000% behind banning software patents. It’s nothing but trouble for them.
I’d also like to note that Microsoft has been very much in favor of software patents since they were invented by the courts (remember: no legislation added software as a category of patentable subject matter: They exist as a result of court rulings!) because they thought they would put an end to open source software (see: Halloween documents). However, software patents have actually cost Microsoft more than they ever helped the company! In short: They’re idiots. They opened a can of worms that’s kept them constantly under attack but because those worms also hurt their perceived enemies they’ve doubled down on their decision.
Software existed for decades without (software) patents and has innovated and evolved vastly more quickly than any other science. Then we created software patents and things actually started to slow down (because lawsuits take time and threaten to end great software before it even exists).
Software is already covered by copyright which is all that was necessary for some of the richest companies in the world to come into existence (e.g. Microsoft, Oracle). Software patents shouldn’t exist!
Why? Software patents are already covered by copyright. Anyone can write software and they automatically get assigned the copyright for it. The barrier to entry is basically zero since everyone has a computer and nearly anyone can learn to program by simply taking the time to do so.
I mean, I also don’t think patents should exist in general but there’s a pretty clear difference between software and things in the physical world. Software is “just math”. And I mean that literally: 100% of all software that exists can be reduced to math that you could–in theory–perform with a pencil and paper.
There’s a lot of reasons why software patents shouldn’t exist far beyond the scope of patents in general.
Copyright only prevents you from copying code, not copying the design. Patents are meant to protect design. I also agree that software patents shouldn't go beyond normal patents or protect overgeneralized stuff with prior art.
Patents are not the problem, they serve as a way to share the knowledge of a creation with everyone while protecting your company for a REASONABLE TIME to compensate for the RnD costs.
The problem is the distortion of the concept to fit late stage capitalism delights.
that’s the only hope, because Nintendo knows that as long as it goes to court, they can bleed out the palworld developers with endless legal attrition. I’m sure they know that these patents aren’t concrete; they’re just an easy way to drag people to court who can’t afford to fight back
People who don’t like Palworld, maybe give a real reason? The AI stuff was made up by a salty troll who admitted later he made it up. It being “legally distinct from pokémon” isn’t a good enough reason. It having the ability to
Spoilerbutcher your Pals for resources
may be a reason to be upset about the gameplay, but then again, many, many, many RPGs have you culling the local wildlife and depopulating a nation for quests too. Neither is the Genshin Impact art style a reason to hate it. That’s just JRPG asthetics.
The butchering thing always bugged me. Where tf do you think your chicken nuggies come from? The only difference is that we don’t let real animals have friends before we kill em
I guess I should have said we don’t make friends with them. I could have also drawn attention to the awful living conditions, but getting all Dominion-y wouldn’t have the pizzazzy oomph that I was going for
Really buggy at launch (not sure if it still is). “Pokemon with guns” is the least creative direction to take the concept. Devs reportedly don’t know how to use any sort of SCM, a basic development tool
People say “Pokemon with guns” as if that was some kind of core gameplay. You can play through the game without ever using them. It’s a small feature, that absolutely is there, but reducing the game to that is missing the forest for the trees.
It’s an open world crafting base building game to enjoy with co-op, that has catchable creatures like Pokemon. There is no Pokemon game that fits this niche. The guns are not important to what the game is.
I would absolutely classify it as “core gameplay” given that it’s the primary ranged weapon of both the playable character and most of the NPCs, past the crossbow. Saying “oh just ignore the stuff you don’t like” is pretty dismissive of critique.
And don’t get me wrong - mons with base building is a good idea, which is why I played it. But IMO palworld doesn’t do much with it but put the two concepts together.
I’m not saying ignore it, it’s a valid reason to not like the game, like any other subjective reason.
I’m saying calling the game “Pokemon with guns” is dismissive of what the game is. It’s like calling Minecraft “Rust with animal husbandry”, which completely misses what the game is about.
It definitely only got popular because of the hype re: “Pokemon with guns,” but it’s legitimately better than the game it actually copied, which is Ark. You know what’s cool about Palworld? Me and my coplayer were able to stop playing without losing everything we’ve built
Anyone who thinks Palworld is actually a Pokemon ripoff either hasn’t played Palworld or hasn’t played Pokemon
Gameplay wise palworld has nothing to do with Pokémon, it was simply a marketing tool for em.
As for the ark comparison I can’t comment, the one time I played it was on the early access launch day during which I refunded it within 45 minutes because it performed horribly, that was almost 10 years ago though so not sure how the current game compares
Butchering your pals is less of a problem than enslaving other human beings.
More to the point it’s just bad. It’s incredibly grindy, has an incongruous tech tree, and the A.I. (both enemy and ally) is trash. It’s also mostly a copy of their previous game, Craftopia, which was also bad and has been in Early Access for 4 years now with no signs of ever leaving it.
I don’t hate Palworld because it’s a low effort Pokemon knockoff, I hate Palworld because it’s a low effort Ark knockoff following the same business plan of not finishing their previous game before abandoning it for their new game. At least with Ark you got to ride dinosaurs rather than store-brand Rapidash.
People need to stop supporting Nintendo at all. They’re lawsuit happy assholes who have been doing everything they can to piss away any good will they might have had. They’re the only game company out there who refuses to make enough of many of their products, like their mini NES and SNES, to meet demand because then its “exclusive”, they are the only company trying to destroy all type of emulation for Nintendo consoles, and they’re the only company who seems to actually want their older games to disappear into the ether. Edit: Oh and they fucking refuse to put their games on sale or lower their prices years afterwards. BoTW is still 60 bucks even though it’s 7 and a half years old. Fucking insane.
Valve to my knowledge doesn’t engage in patent trolling and so it’s not all hardware manufacturers.
And even with Sony and Microsoft? Do they engage in bottom of the barrel patent trolling? If anything MS has definitely been on the receiving end of patent trolls. Do they go after people who stream/make video content with their games?
Don’t get me wrong, I am not defending Sony or Microsoft. But it’s a bit strange to engage in volunteer PR for a company just because you’re a fan of the Mario series (not saying this applies to you, but this is not an unreasonable statement with respect to Nintendo fans in general).
Absolutely not true. All the console creators, sure, but not all developers. There are so many good developers, especially indie.
There’s issues with purchasing anything in capitalism. We have to deal with that as long as that’s the case though. It doesn’t mean Nestlé isn’t significantly worse than other campanies though, for example. There are different degrees of bad, and Nintendo is basically the top for gaming.
trying to destroy all type of emulation for Nintendo consoles
Only emulation used by others. They’re happy to kang all’ the ROMs and emulators off’ a site before destroying it for everyone else, then not even sell most of the damn things. Absurd. There’s nothing good about that, not even for Nintendo themselves.
Sorta true. Nintendo has been monetizing emulation for years, ever since they started releasing “virtual console” games on the Wii web shop.
The Switch now offers NES/SNES games as a benefit of their online service, and has released a handful of games as standalone releases which are literally just nicely-packaged emulators (Mario Sunshine and Galaxy 1/2 bundle for example)
If emulation and “piracy” of old consoles is allowed, then Nintendo fears it won’t be able to charge as much to repackage identical technology as full-price game releases.
Obviously this depends on the exact details of the patents, which are all in Japanese, as well as the specifics of Japanese patent laws.
However, patents only last for 20 years, and they are undermined by public disclosure before filing. The first Pokemon game came out more than 20 years ago. However^2 not all of the features in the patents were present in the original games. All 3 patents were first filed in 2021, well after many of these features were established.
The first patent is about aiming something and entering into a fight mode. This wasn’t in the original game. Aiming at enemies and entering a fight mode almost certainly existed before Pokemon (Final Fantasy perhaps). Furthermore, Palworld doesn’t really have a fight mode - it isn’t a turn based game but real time. Throwing a sphere is just one way to start a “battle” but there is no mode change between “explore” and “battle” modes because they are functionally the same in Palworld. Pokemon Go and Pokemon Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee, which were all around in 2018, would seem to amount to public disclosure that undermines this patent.
The second patent has more detail about catching Pokemon outside of battles. This might have some elements of Palworld gameplay in it. However, again we have prior art that predates the patent.
The third patent is about riding characters. This has certainly existed in other games before Pokemon and before this patent. Off the top of my head, World of Warcraft had you riding mounts, Final Fantasy had you riding Chocobos, and Mega Man let you ride Rush.
However the big issue with all of these is that these challenges are always better off done before the patent is granted. With the patents established it is a massive uphill struggle trying to get them withdrawn. Given that each charge is only for $33,000, so about $100,000 total, I expect a settlement will be reached instead of going on this fight.
Looking it up, Palworld was announced in 2021, but not released (under early access) until 2024. However they were apparently designing the game back in 2020, if not earlier.
Software parents, specifically game mechanic parents, are fucking insane. You should see the stuff Square Enix has patented following death stranding.
I get the whole “they just reskinned my game mechanics!!!” but also: I don’t. It’s like saying Go, Draughts, Chess, etc. are copies or “infringing” on one another for being a board game set on a grid with black/white pieces.
Even the idea of intellectual property is shaky for me but at least it’s more clear cut whether you’ve directly copied or deceived someone with a similar design of a character.
kotaku.com
Aktywne