So far Pocketpair has been VERY careful about actually infringing on copyright or trademarks. People smarter than I am are pretty certain that if Nintendo or the Pokemon Company could take legal action against the game as it is, they would have already. The important things to note are that you cannot copyright an art style and you cannot copyright or patent game mechanics. And even if things were touch and go, the gameplay loop of adding survival elements and an emphasis on cooperative guild base management is pretty transformative compared to Pokemon games. So as long as they avoid adding pals that are so close to their Pokemon counterparts that they don’t pass the squint test they will be alright.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Remember for the first half of the year every new release competed with the last to be “the worst release of all time”. The second half of the year was spectacular though!
There’s a lot of negativity here, and a lot of it is pretty justified. But I don’t hate the idea of paid mods. Like if there’s a way for authors like the ones the made Enderal or other really big mods to make some money off of it that’s really great. Is Bethesda going to be fair about them? Probably not. Is Bethesda going to be competent with the system? Probably as competent as they are at anything else (derogatory).
But at least it’s a way that you can make some money back for your work where you don’t have to worry about chargebacks from trolls costing you more than the donations they were originally giving you. And this can be a pretty big problem for donation driven works. Someone donates $1, 200 times. Then charges them all back. Paypal charges you $15 processing fee for each chargeback. And you can contest it but who needs that? If Bethesda can be the entity brokering all of it, then they are the ones that take the chargeback risk.
So in theory, I don’t hate it. But it will all depend on the implementation and competency of Bethesda (not looking good here).
Can you elaborate on what you mean by “this is not a serious game, this is a traditional game with the goal of making players think”? I like the idea of games that make players think but saying it’s not a serious game can mean you intend it to be silly or that it’s a very low priority for you and that people shouldn’t take it too seriously.
A certain number of hours reached is a fairly easy metric to use and it works great for a lot of games. But let me tell you about Senua’s Sacrifice… that game is short. It was only $20 or something and 8 hours to play through. But it made me ugly cry at the ending. It was so emotionally charged I just sobbed for the girl. That was definitely worth the price.
For coop games with dialog I really loved how Baldur’s Gate 3 let everyone see the dialog choices and click on them to vote for what they would want. The player in the dialog didn’t have to choose it, but they could see and it let every player feel like they were a part of every conversation instead of just watching.