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.
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.
From the article:
They [Colopl] have, I think, almost 2,000 [employees], nobody but knows them outside Japan but they had a famous mobile game called White Cat Project, not copying Mario, not copying Pokémon, not copying Zelda, nothing at all. Nintendo brought forward six patents […]
One of the patents was for a confirmation screen after sleep mode. […]
And they had five other ones, including one for isometric, pseudo, 3D games, when the character is hidden behind the tree, the game forms a shadow, so you have a kind of sense for where the character is, even though you don’t see the character clearly. Nintendo has a patent on that, […]
Yeah, they are abusing the patent system. And yes, they potentially have a case against basically any game. This is what we should be talking about.
And we would be talking about it, if Palworld was NOT such a blatant ripoff of Pokemon.
It’s like using the OJ Simpson trial as an example of how messed up the LAPD is. Is the LAPD fucked up? Yes. Is OJ Simpson someone that we should be sympathetic to? Not so much.
If they start going after games that are NOT blatant ripoffs of their IP, then yes, I’m much more concerned about the abuses of the patent system. Patent trolling IS a real problem, I’m just not sure if Palworld is the right catalyst for people to be sympathetic about patent trolling.
