So you don’t think these patents are going after any aspect of Palworld that players would recognize as a defining feature of a Pokémon game?
I mean, there’s like a mechanic where you throw the spheres, right? And this is a very obvious, in your face system [that’s very much like Pokémon]. But I think that it will be a lot more technical than this. Nintendo would have dug through every single action inside the game, they would have probably reverse engineered it, and just find ways to sue these guys.
You can bet your life that Nintendo hates this company, and they couldn’t find an angle with the character designs. This is why they are not mentioned in their press release. So they come with these technical peculiarities. So I personally believe, if you act like this, you can sue like 90 percent of the game developers in the world. I’m sure there’s like thousands of games that have a confirmation screen when you go from sleep mode to resuming the game right, but if you basically trigger the wrath of Nintendo, they will come after you.
Got too big?
I haven’t heard anyone mention this since like a month after it came out. It’s down to 20k players from like two million in January.
https://steamcharts.com/app/1623730
This is just Nintendo’s standard glacial pace. We’ve had ROM sites up for a decade before they were taken down. No doubt some team of lawyers have been collecting a gargantuan hourly rate while putting together all the images of Palworld NPCs and how they’re blatant Pokemon rip-offs.
And they’re not wrong, exactly. There’s a lot of Pokemon rip-off games about. Digimon, Yokai Watch, Temtem, etc. But only Palworld has had me see the screenshots and go “they’re Pokemon”. Even Aldi don’t advertise their frosted flakes with a cartoon tiger in a red neckerchief. There are lines, and when you step over them lawyers tend to get involved.
You haven’t read the article, have you?
The problem is not the pals looking like Pokémon. The problem is that Nintendo has an enormous amount of software patents for stuff as dumb as “a confirmation pop-up window after resuming a game from sleep”.
They could literally sue any videogame in the world if they wanted because of their patent trolling in software. And that is dangerous for everyone. They can sue you for patent infringement if you make a game where the players catch a creature with a sphere. Because yeah, they patented that.
I’m taking issue with the “got too big” part.
Nintendo are patent trolls, but I think we all know why they’re going after Palworld and it won’t be about confirmation screens.
Actually that’s what they are going after. That’s why they are filing a patent infringement and not a copyright infringement cause.
