Wouldn’t a game mechanic/animation like that be equivalent to a stunt in a movie?
Like, imagine if a film director wanted to blow up a car in his movie, but was getting sued by Paramount because Michael Bay already blew up a car in Transformers.
The last Nintendo console I bought was the Nintendo DS lite. The last Nintendo product I bought was Age of Empires DS The Age of Kings.
As you can probably tell, that was a rather long time ago. Since getting my first TTDS flash card I’ve more or less exclusively pirated Nintendo things. I’ll just continue doing that.
I’ve only pirated old stuff, games from my youth that are collectible items now for silly money or a complete crapshoot on whether 30 year old tech has stood the test of time.
If I had the time to play them I would definitely see my conscience clear on pirating new stuff from them now.
I jailbroke my Switch after they went after Yuzu in March last year. Every time I read about them, it makes pirating new games on it more satisfying. I’m really gonna enjoy Metroid Prime 4 on it!
We are talking about gliding on a mount…a very common game feature…
"On November 30th, 2024, we released Patch v0.3.11 for Palworld,” it said. “This patch removed the ability to summon Pals by throwing Pal Spheres and instead changed it to a static summon next to the player.
Well I am talking about the blatant plagiarism, which is what the devs for Palworld did.
Summoning creatures from an object is hardly “blatant plagiarism”. Many, many, many games have the ability to summon creatures from an object. Pokemon was certainly not the first one to do it…
Summoning creatures from an object is hardly “blatant plagiarism”. Many, many, many games have the ability to summon creatures from an object. Pokemon was certainly not the first one to do it…
What will you argue if I bring up the fact that they ripped off countless Pokemon?
Oh wait.
I don’t care because I am not here to argue with someone who doesn’t understand what plagiarism is. Luckily the courts do, and ruled on the case. :)
What will you argue if I bring up the fact that they ripped off countless Pokemon?
The case case isn’t about character designs, the case is about patents Nintendo filed after PocketPair released a game with said mechanics. The idea that one should be able to patent a game mechanic someone else has already released in their games is BS. Japan’s patent system sucks and Nintendo sucks for abusing it.
The courts ruled it isn’t plagerism. So… You’re looking pretty stupid here.
The patents in question have nothing to do with creature designs. And neither would patent law be covering the design of creatures. That would be copyright law.
Buddy, quit while you’re ahead not too far behind. You’re just proving what @Tattorack said: you don’t understand the difference between patents, copyright, and trademarks.
I never claimed to be an expert, and mistakes happen. Good thing the difference between the three doesn’t matter when Palworld blatantly plagiarized the Pokemon games, and I have yet to hear an actual argument how it didn’t rip off another game.
But I get it. Pokemon can pew pew now and ignoramus’ eat up gun play.
You do you bud, but if you think this is me “acting tough” for telling you that your actions will eventually have consequences, you must feel constantly threatened.
the difference here is that a ton of other creature collector games have done something similar when it comes to summoning them. Coromon is the first one thst pops up in my head.
what makes palworld different? it genuinely sold well, enough to challenge Nintendo and it’s monopoly with their Pokémon games. Which they barely put any effort in nowadays because they sell regardless because of brand loyalty
What I will tell you is I live in Canada, I live in BC, and all of this can be gleamed from my profile. If you find yourself in my neck of the woods hit me up keyboard warrior.
Except it doesn’t. Nintendo was only able to do this by exploiting Japanese-specific patent law since Palworld is made by a Japanese company. They had no case otherwise.
That’s another thing if they could allow specific api and opensource those parts they remove so someone can create mod that brings all of this back. Like we removed it but we make those things opensource, do what you want, we don’t care. It’s not in paid version of our app.
I think everyone understands that nintendo are bad guys in this this situation but pocketpair is just scared. They just say we want to get over it as soon as possible to focus on our game. I understand that small company is scared of old, long timer in this business. But they need to turn it over because if they behave like a sheep they will be eaten by wolf.
If they could change narrative and simply add. We removed those things and replaced it with this but we don’t care what you do with our game. Here is api. Do what the fuck you want.
Sorry, I meant that most companies do fixes to comply with local legislations/sentences and then ignore them everywhere else, Pocketpair can’t do that because they are being sentenced in their home jurisdiction, so their infractions in other jurisdictions could and would still be brought to court.
“The company with the best, cheapest product will come out on top… Unless the shittier company has more money and lawyers and then they sue everyone else into the ground for even attempting to break into the market.”
2 years seems like a nightmare for indie developers. Do you want a bunch of AI Chinese cash grabs pushing things out like Hollow Knight 2: Microtransaction Edition or Stardew Valley Romance Sims? Because without IP protection, indie developers will get creamed.
I don’t remember all of the differences, but I think you’re conflating copyright, patent, and trademark here. Software patents should almost not be a thing, but copyright and trademark should still exist.
in most countries, afaik, you actually can’t patent game mechanics, for the same reason you can’t patent rule sets for boardgames:
because they are essentially just logical connections. it would be like patenting math, which is also not allowed, for very obvious reasons. (with some very specific, very niche exceptions)
japan is just plain weird and wrong about their patent system.
that’s why all of the lawsuits about this stuff are happening in japan; not just because that’s where the companies are, but because japanese copyright law is (especially) fucked.
For trivial software features like these, definitely not. I think patents start to make sense in the area of really advanced algorithms, like SAT solvers, ML, and so on. So conditional on patents in general making sense, those kinds of patents seem legit to me.
They didn’t start the fight. They were sued. If you think “picking a fight with Nintendo” is something you can do any time, and on your own volition, you must be missing something.
Since when is flying on a monster patentable. What a bunch of bullshit. Nintendo has really used up the last of any good will the company had. I will not be giving them a dime from here on out.
Yeah, Nintendo seems to think they are untouchable. They can do whatever, charge whatever, not even innovate anymore with the Switch 2, and attack fans. I’m done with Nintendo, the only way I’ll ever play any of their games is on the high seas.
Legal battles aren’t exactly cheap and they can drag on for years. Pocket Pair could end up bankrupt in the meantime from excessive legal costs, while Nintendo can keep that shit going for decades.
This lawsuit is so stupid. In my opinion, patenting, copyrighting, or trademarking concepts or mechanics in video games shouldn’t be allowed at all. The nemesis system in the Shadow of Mordor games was so cool, but we’re never going to see anything like it again. Warner went through the trouble to copyright (or something idk I’m not a lawyer) that system, and then let the series die out.
I’m waiting to see the headlines that any other games with a shooty thing that goes bang is illegal, and the concept of shooting a gun in a video game is going to be owned by either Rockstar/Take Two or the collective mob of Call of Duty developers. If the world is gonna get that stupid, I got my fingers crossed that Bubsy 3D owns the rights to jumping
Edit: Thought about it for 10 more seconds and I have questions. Is it specifically gliding using a creature that Nintendo has a problem with, or is it creature-assisted traversal in general? Can they sue Skyrim since you can ride horses? Palworld made the change so that you need to build a glider to glide around. BOTW and TOTK used gliders. Is Nintendo gonna sue them for that now too? I fucking hate all of this so God damned much
I’m unconvinced that the Nemesis system would have worked well in too many other settings, but one game patent that had a tangible effect on the industry was Bandai-Namco’s patent on loading screen mini games. Remember how you could make the Soul Calibur II characters yell stuff while the match loaded? Funny that we didn’t see it again until Street Fighter 6, isn’t it? Conveniently after a patent would have expired. We went through an entire era of games with load times that could have benefited from mini games, and by the time the patent expired, we had largely come up with ways to get rid of load screens altogether.
Well saying the nemesis system wouldn’t have worked well in other games is almost assuming that it wouldn’t be changed or evolved to fit other genres. People forget that the real damage some patents/copyrights do is not in their explicit existence, it’s the sphere of influence they exert on related concepts entirely. We weren’t just robbed of the nemesis system, we were robbed of anything even slightly resembling it.
And I feel like once you understand that you realize it can be adapted to greater things. Spider Man games could have used it. Assassins creed would have been an amazing place for experimentation with those ideas. Could be adapted to Star Wars games, dragons dogma, yakuza, borderlands. And it doesn’t need to be a central focus of these games like it was with the WB games. But even the concept of having enemies that kill you be leveled up in some way is now tainted.
Maybe it is a lack of imagination on my part, but that mechanic seems to rely heavily on characters that can be killed and come back to life with a vengeance on a regular basis, which I don’t think makes sense in any of the settings you listed except for Borderlands, with its New-U stations, funny enough. You could adapt it into something where both you and an enemy are defeated non-lethally, I suppose, but that’s a concept that strangely doesn’t have a common template in video games.
Horizon Zero Dawn would have been awesome with a nemesis system, especially if it was applied to the robo-dinosaurs. You could have the in-universe justification that a particular robot uploads its consciousness upon death and downloads into a new body, and now it remembers how you killed it before and it will adapt accordingly. Start having epic robots that know you, and you have to keep an eye out for them, but also upon being destroyed they could dispense better scraps.
Lmao bro wut? The majority of gamers is in their 20s…found the neckbearded cheeto whose gonna boot lick for that switch 2 that’s weaker then a 1050ti and an Xbox series S lmao
Nintendo’s target audience is often young adults, with a large share of Switch players falling between 20 and 25 years old. And then 40 year old
I have already boycotted Nintendo, but nice try? I’m on PC and steam deck.
Also a lot of these concerns were not major issues when the switch 1 came out. So I don’t really go off the switch 1 ownership results since Nintendo seems to have done some serious damage to themselves in the past 1-3 years alone.
most consumers don’t care, that’s why they’re consumers. Switch 2 is gonna sell gangbusters and no amount of frivolous lawsuits is going to put a dent in that.
Plus you still have people mad at Palworld for no reason other than they think it “copied” Pokémon, like the guy getting downvoted into oblivion.
It’s the using a creature to glide that’s the specific problem this time. Not the “using a creature” per se, but “pressing a button to instantly summon a non-player-controlled game-creature to allow for gliding, which is instantly dismissed once the player touches the ground” or something like that in the patent
Yes, the more you read the patent the more you just want to grab whoever approved it and force them to explain how and why it deserved it, despite lots of prior implementations.
As far as I understand patent law, if nobody has actually patented something someone can just say “mine lol” and scoop up royalties and block shit for spite.
As described in the patent, yes. You press one button, you start riding said mount. If it’s glider mount, it automatically changes to the stag once you touch the ground OR to the fish if you fall to the water.
Palworld never had this “automatic change from one mount to another”, at best it was the glider pals that you didn’t have to manually summon in order to glide and went away once you touched the ground or water. I’ve skimmed the patent a few times, but I don’t recall it having a case for going from creature-assisted-gliding to back on foot
Iirc sony has a patent on an input device having two separate data streams. It seems you write the most general thing you can on patents and patent offices don’t care
Unfortunately, at least in the US (and from the sound of it, probably Japan), the patent office has the viewpoint of ‘patent everything and let the courts sort them out.’ The courts, on the other hand, defer to the patent office because ‘it’s they’re job so they must know what they’re doing.’
patenting, copyrighting, or trademarking concepts or mechanics in video games shouldn’t be allowed at all
It’s not allowed at all in board games. There’s a known issue that someone could completly copy the mechanics of a board game, and as long as they don’t copy the art or the exact text of the rulebook there is no legal means to stop it.
Boardgamers are aware of this, and agree that it is better for development of future games than if someone could own the idea of “rolling a dice”, so if knockoffs do come around they tend to quickly get called out and not purchased.
I don’t know how videogames managed to get different rules.
I don’t know how videogames managed to get different rules.
A lot of people in those offices really don’t understand the technical mumbo jumbo that can be summed up as “doing something that already exists, but on a computer”
Like scanning a document on a printer and immediately sending it as email. That was patented
There’s a parasitic egg layer that uses leaves some get put into birds and then get shit out? Why isn’t Nintendo suing these insects for using birds to fly around?
I would say it’s completely unnecessary in this example. Or are you worried that someone might think that, “Minecraft and Forza Horizon 5” is a single game?
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