Anybody who’s played palworld knows the game is nothing like pokemon. What’s next, are they going to claim they are the only company who can make games with 4 legged animals?
They said patent violations, not copyright, so it is about some sort of mechanic or system and not the pals or any specific designs. I’m guessing the thrown ball capture system, since it seems no other developers have published anything using that specifically.
They shouldnt be able to sue for that cause a patent only lasts for 20 years in Japan. I saw some guesses that there might be a patent for one of their legends games that they are suing for.
I don’t understand. Everyone, literally EVERYONE was calling this game pokemon with guns when it released, so why are people mad that the makers of pokemon are suing? We all saw it from the start
I think it’s understandable why they sue them (I doubt it holds up in court though), it’s just horrible business practice because Nintendo is too lazy to actually innovate and do something creative for a change, instead of sitting on franchises like that and do fuck all with it, only releasing repetitive piss-poor games based on the exact same concept they invented like 30+ years ago.
The problem is people will still buy Pokemon, even if they’re absolute garbage games. So Nintendo won’t change it either.
I think it’s an issue with Japanese game companies in general. I’ve been complaining about Capcom forever. Megaman 11 was a side scroller. I’m a massive mega man fan and I like the side scroll. But it’s 2024. Can we try something new? I would love a ratchet and Clank style, open world 3d mega man where you go to the different areas of the city and take down the bosses. Also games like monster hunter, are so janky and look 10 years out of date, and most Capcom games look outdated
Palworld is an open world survival crafting factory/base building game, that happens to borrow the catching mechanic from Pokemon (who borrowed it from Shin Megami Tensei).
Copying would imply a one to one duplication. The catching system in Palworld differs in multiple ways from the Pokemon system. I think that’s enough to call it borrowing and not copying.
K first of all, the mechanic you’re referencing was already an established mechanic before Pokemon Red/Blue came out. The Pokemon Company didn’t invent the “creature catcher” genre of video games.
Second of all, as I’ve said already, the catching mechanic in Palworld is absolutely distinct enough to be considered as drawing inspiration from Pokemon, and not copying. If you wanna get into the nitty gritty, I’ll meet you down there, but if you’re just gonna continue to spout meaningless contrarianisms I’ve got better things to do
Third of all, “cell shaded anime art style” describes hundreds if not thousands of video games, not just Pokemon games. You can’t realistically claim that Palworld copied Pokemon’s art style* just because it uses a cell-shaded anime style, especially because Pokemon has only used that art direction for the last two generations of games, and the style has been in use long before sword and shield came out.
but not capturing by weakening the creature and throwing a ball at them.
If you think “throwing a ball” is a patentable (or even copyrightable) mechanic, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Palworld explicitly copies the style of creature design from Pokemon
Some pals are similar to Pokemon, sure, but a lot are quite distinct. If you have a problem with that though, take it up with The Pokemon Company, because they did it first.
The developers knew exactly what they were doing, so to claim it wasn’t intentional is disingenuous at best.
Of course it was intentional to make a game in the same genre as Pokemon, with similar mechanics. That’s how video games in the same genre work. You make them similar to things you know people like, so that there’s a greater chance they’ll like your game too, but you also introduce new, unique things so that you’re not copying. Yes, Palworld did that intentionally.
None of that is illegal though, or shouldn’t be anyways, unless they’re straight up stealing assets/code from a Pokemon game and using it in Palworld.
the mechanic is capturing a creature by weakening them and throwing a ball at them. Not just throwing a ball.
And like I’ve said before, Shin Megami Tensei did this before Pokemon. This concept was not original to Pokemon, and exists in several other creature catcher games.
None of the creatures I’ve seen are entirely new designs, but rather hybrids of existing, well known Pokemon.
Then you haven’t seen a large portion of Pals. Plenty of pals are unique. Some of them look similar to Pokemon, sure, because they’re based on the same real world animal.
outright lying to defend them and ignoring obvious facts does
🙄🙄🙄
It’s fine to admit that a thing you like has flaws, and admit that those flaws need addressing.
K, Palworld has flaws. Never claimed otherwise.
We’ve run far field of the point though. Palworld is being sued for patent infringement. If there was ever a patent on the “weaken creature then capture” mechanic, it’s long expired, so they’re not being sued over that. They’re not being sued over art or Pal designs, because that would be copyright infringement, not a patent violation.
Given those facts, what do you think Palworld is being sued for?
Lots of games are also called Roguelike. Based off a game called Rogue. The makers of Rogue do not get to sue the makers of Hades.
Pets that fight for you, including being able to store them for portable carry has been done by many other games, including Ark. In fact, playing Palworld made me compare it more to Ark than Pokemon: base building, automation, catching dinos/animals/monsters of different varieties for different uses. Some can fly, some run, some can be used as parachutes. Some help automate actions at base. There is a tech tree unlocked by leveling, starting with primitive weapons and moving on to guns and higher caliber guns. Blueprints are common in ark for higher quality crafts to build at, you guessed it, crafting benches.
Collecting wood, stone, metals, etc. Also the animal assistants can help there too, but only certain ones. Also, Ark has cryopods for storing your animals/dinosaurs. You even throw em to release.
If they had exactly Pikachu or something it’s one thing, but similar games are just part of the business.
But we’re not talking about a game type here. You can agree that this is a dumb lawsuit, but you have to be honest. Palworld was marketed online as pokemon with guns. It’s not just a similar style but almost identically copies the characters in Pokemon. You can make a stealth action political thriller video game, but if the main character looks just like solid Snake and is called “Viper”, you gonna get sued.
Really? Why does Deathstroke and Deadpool both exist? One is DC, one is Marvel, and Deadpool pretty much started as an expy. Slade Wilson and Wade Wilson. You’re arguing from a place of what feels like it should be wrong, yet your fake example has been done in the real world and they got away with it.
This happens so many times in industries they can often just argue parody. In fact, changing a name slightly is classic parody to avoid being sued. Japan in particular often just bleeps out a syllable or forgets a character in the name.
I played it and I felt like it borrowed a lot of elements from Pokemon. It wasn’t Pokemon, but you can’t deny it took like 90% of their inspiration from Pokemon and then added guns to it.
That’s like any FPS game ripping off any other FPS game.
Fight, capture, tame, train, breed animals.
Base building, research tree, enemy raids.
Exploration, resource gathering, survival.
I don’t think Nintendo has a monopoly on enslaving animals.
I know what you mean, tho. It’s always described as “Pokémon with guns and 3xE gameplay”.
But does Nintendo actually have a case that will hold up in courts?
Pocketpair seems confident they can defend against it. So either they have done their research and are up for a fight. Or they (think they) are calling Nintendo’s bluff.
But Nintendo has a whole pack of lawyers.
Unfortunately there are no details on what the patents being infringemed upon are, just that they relate to “Pocket Monster”.
But it’s the combination of it all, aside from guns and concentration camp levels of slavery, that make it look like they straight up copied ideas from Pokemon.
It’s true Nintendo doesn’t hold the specific style or gameplay mechanics, and that’s where I think they’ll fail to win a case, but just saying it’s just so blatantly obvious where the inspiration comes from.
I have a feeling that this is going to be the case. Palworld is not copying anything so it’s not copyright and doesn’t even need a “fair use” argument for it. The patents of gameplay mechanics don’t really hold up in court.
Nintento’s legal battle chest is stuff of nightmares for smaller companies and they should be countersued for anti competitive behavior.
That said, lawyers can send a C&D letter for anything. Doesn’t mean it will hold up in court, but they’re betting the target won’t want to pay that kind of money to fight it.
Dragon Ball was using capsules to store things long before Pokemon did. And Dragon Ball Z, which ended in Japan in '96 had already done storing 'creatures in capsules. Saibamen for one. And after the Saiyan saga Bulma puts her dead friends in coffin capsules.
Yeah, they should absolutely argue that storing things, alive or not, in capsules has been used in numerous movies and shows and that the patent is invalid. Big corporations make tons of patents all the time just in case and then see if they hold up in court later, such as Nintendo with their pokeballs in this case. They still don’t know whether Palworld is an infringement or not
So… Um… If Nintendo patented elements of Pokemon (we don’t know what the patents are yet), then… Why is TemTem allowed to live? TemTem is literally one-to-one Pokemon, all but in name.
If, somehow, TemTem isn’t in violation of Nintendo’s patents, despite just being Pokemon made by someone else, then I’m very curious what Nintendo’s patent actually is.
Could it be the capture ball? TemTem uses cards. Palworld uses balls like Pokemon. Did Nintendo patent the idea of capturing creatures inside of balls, specifically? Is that why Nintendo never went after TemTem?
I agree, and want to add that it could also be that PalWorld is a bigger target because it is kinda like a Mickey Mouse horror film: it runs counter to the brand of Pokemon to have a game where you shoot them with heavy weaponry.
I’m not sure why. TemTem, and a number of smaller projects like it, are basically exact copies of Pokemon and have been around far longer, some with succesfull kickstarter campaigns.
I remember Nintendo being RUTHLESS when people over at GBATemp tried making a smash bros clone for the NDS… For free.
If Temtem is a Pokemon ripoff then Pokemon is a Dragon Quest V ripoff. All these games involve collecting monsters through battle. Can anyone really patent “monster catching RPG?”
There are only two things Dragon Quest V and Pokemon have in common; monster taming through battle and they’re both turn based RPGs.
Have you played or seen TemTem? It’s literally Pokemon in every way, from mechanics, level design, to even how and what kind of moves the Tems can learn.
Nintendo goes after even the smallest infringements, so since they’ve never gone after TemTem it tells me the patent isn’t “monster catching RPG”. It’s more specific than that, and Palworld somehow infringes on it. As of yet we can only guess what the patent is.
I’ve never heard of TemTem before and plugging it into Google Trends, it looks like it’s not even comparable to Palworld. It’s still somewhat big, looks like 500,000 copies sold. But still doesn’t really compare to what appears to be nearly 20 million Palworld players.
Companies lose rights to protect their IP if they don’t protect it themselves, so it may be in their best interest to go after the big competitors and pretend they’ve never heard of TemTem.
There is also cassette bests. It just makes it obvious that they fon’t care about their ip or it’s not out of principle, it’s just because someone else made a game that don’t suck and people like, which is something they can not do.
500,000 copies sold is not insignificant. Nintendo fries even the smallest of fish. They’ll literally go out of their way to fuck up someone’s small hobby project only a niche few even care about. So if Nintendo is turning blind eye to a game that copied them in every way one could possibly copy a Pokemon game, then there’s something else going on.
Remember, this is not a copyright case, this is a patent case. Considering Palworld is the only game vaguely similar to Pokemon in some minor ways that I’ve seen use spheres as a catching tool, I’m just (blindly) guessing it MIGHT have something to do with that.
Well, it makes me think that AI training was probably biased towards legal drivel like this, since it’s public facing, professional and likely even translated in multiple languages.
The student got so good that people think the teacher is imitating it.
Is that the wrong link? This seems totally unrelated to Pokemon in boxes, and is more about multi console character storage systems. This patent just sounds like someone described steam cloud saves in way too many big words.
In the “other references” they link to the bulbapedia article for Pokemon box so I figured thats what the whole thing was about, but yeah it does read like accessing data on a server
How can they let companies file such broad, vague patents for mechanics that have existed since forever? For example, 20240286040, is just what flying mounts have done in WoW since 2007 or even the flying cap in Mario 64 ffs. There are probably other earlier examples, but it goes to show that it’s just noise to monopolize innovation and scare other devs.
Long story short, the claims get much longer and restrictive through the application process. The example you asked about is currently undergoing a non-final rejection, and the claims will get much more restrictive in further iterations (assuming that the application has actual merit somewhere in the original dependent claims)
You can check the application history here: Global Dossier
Since this was filed in Japan, it would have to be patents Nintendo own in Japan that are infringed and those don’t necessarily perfectly match those in the US
I’m sorry who in their right mind signed off on this patent
NON-TRANSITORY COMPUTER-READABLE STORAGE MEDIUM HAVING STORED THEREIN GAME PROGRAM, GAME SYSTEM, INFORMATION PROCESSING APPARATUS, AND INFORMATION PROCESSING METHOD
Fuck nintendo. I really hope this blows up in their face like their stupid fucking “King Kong is dk” lawsuit. Fucking bullies. The irony that they blatantly stole the designs of pokemon from dragon quest but are butthurt at palworld for pAtEnT vIoLaTiOn is gross. So glad I just pirate their shit.
Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Nintendo Co., Ltd. was a 1983 legal case heard by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York by Judge Robert W. Sweet. In their complaint, Universal Studios alleged that Nintendo’s video game Donkey Kong was a trademark infringement of King Kong, the plot and characters of which Universal claimed as their own. Nintendo argued that Universal had themselves proven that King Kong’s plot and characters were in the public domain in Universal City Studios, Inc. v. RKO General, Inc.
Reminder that Nintendo is to Japan as Disney is to the USA.
We can only speculate what patents are involved, might be legit might not but it doesn’t have to be legit and the actual patent they obtained could be nonsense, they have the power to bend someone over a chair because they felt like it.
Also reminder apple managed to patent a rectangle. what countries allow to be patented is often bullshit at best.
At the root of this cognitive dissonance is who benefits and who doesn’t. Copyright law is selectively applied in a way that protects the powerful and exploits the powerless. In a capitalist economy copyright is meant to protect people’s livelihoods by ensuring they are compensated for their labor, but due to the power imbalance inherent to capitalism it is instead used only to protect the interests of capital. The fact that AI companies are granted full impunity to violate the copyright of millions is evidence that copyright law is ineffective at the task for which it was purportedly created.
Its just unprecedented terroritory and the cutting edge of technology is always at odds with the slower justice system. Not taking sides here but the only entities that are on the cutting edge of tech innovation are generally always going to be tech corporations.
In a capitalist economy copyright is meant to protect people’s livelihoods by ensuring they are compensated for their labor
Whose propaganda did you suck down blindly? Copyright is meant to foster and improve the commons and public domain, and only that. The goal of copyright is not “money” and monopolies, but that’s what capitalism does to things designated as property.
The fact you can transfer and sell your copyright (because it’s property in capitalism), it becomes a commodity to be bought and sold and traded. If copyright was not tradeable or transferable, we wouldn’t be in in this situation where art is property to be owned.
Chill out a bit, my comment could not have possibly given you the impression that I’m a supporter of capitalism if you had read it carefully. I began my comment by putting forward the capitalist argument for copyright - a steel-man argument - and ended it by debunking it.
Copyright is meant to foster and improve the commons and public domain
You said yourself that copyright establishes art as private property (or “intellectual property” if we’re being more precise). That does the opposite of fostering and improving the commons and public domain.
If copyright was not tradeable or transferable
Then it wouldn’t be copyright. Copyright is a capitalist construct, not a public good corrupted by capital.
We’re saltly because all of these rich people truly got to skirt copyright laws while regular people got in trouble for “digesting the same digital bits.” They even get to resell any work that has been processed and mixed with other works as long as it comes from their AI…
why is Nintendo going after pokemon with guns and not that one game that popped up on the steam home page (I disabled NSFW tags) that’s literally just 2d Pokemon but if you beat the trainer you fuck them.
Bad move by Nintendo. This game was on track to be forgotten. Pocketpair forgot about it months ago, but the players were starting to catch on to that. Now there will be a resurgence of interest.
Nah all that gamer malice will be dropped at the tip of a hat with a Switch 2 announcement sadly. Pocketpair will be bled of money into bankruptcy and Nintendo will win.
The steam deck didn’t exist when the switch came out, it innovated and filled a niche that turned out to be a severely underserved segment of the gaming market.
Nintendo struck gold with the switch, and a ‘switch 2’ likely isn’t going to cut it.
It’s not like Nintendo is infallible, remember the console before the switch was the Wii u.
Game is just outside the top 50 on steam and had a major content release at the end of June. This ‘game is dying’-because-it-didn’t-indefinitely-sustain-player-counts-in-the-top-10 meme is dumb as hell.
It’s a pocketpair thing though as far as “abandoning” a game. As a craftopia player I know all too well how they start off and then drag their feet with minimal input after a certain time. It’s one thing I was worried about with palworld before it even came out. :/
They had to wait for PalWorld to sell a lot and make a lot of money so they can financially ruin these people instead of just telling them “don’t do that.”
They had to wait for PalWorld to sell a lot and make a lot of money so they can financially ruin these people instead of just telling them “don’t do that." make themselves a lot of money by doing nothing but make a lawsuit to steal their earnings."
nintendo.co.jp
Aktywne