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.
Actually that’s what they are going after. That’s why they are filing a patent infringement and not a copyright infringement cause.
Yes… technically. But clearly with those broad parents the could also technically go after other monster catching games that have been around forever. I think the point is that Palworld poked the bear a little too much, particularly with the character designs which look to me like they fed all 1000+ Pokemon into generative AI and slapped the results into their game. Are they getting sued for character design? No. Do I think that is a big part of WHY they are being sued? Absolutely.
Yeah but that’s not the point.
The point is Nintendo being able to parent troll any threat they see because the Japanese patent system is so dumb and rotten that they are allowed to patent something as stupid as a confirmation window to resume a game.
That is the real problem here. Nintendo is being shitty and has a dangerous capability to literally kill any game they don’t like.
That’s all that matters. They can (and will, let’s not pretend they are a charity) sue potentially any competitors because of this. Nintendo is not a good company and doesn’t act in good will. They want money, and they will do whatever to get more. Shutting down a fan game by simply saying “I have more money than you so even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you can’t afford defending against me” or patent trolling any game that has even a simple confirmation window.
Yeah, they could. However, I think if they DID sue Digimon, TemTem, Monster Hunters, etc using the same patent trolling tactics, they’d probably have a harder time winning, because those games haven’t (as blatantly) copied Nintendo. I suspect that’s why they haven’t done so.
