Wow… didn’t see that coming… /s
- Posts “Surprised Picachu face” image
- Gets DMCA’ed by Nintendo lawyers
I’m so behind on Pokemon that I genuinely can’t tell if this is a Pokemon or a Pal.
As someone with minimal pokemon knowledge, only played two due to being older and not having Nintendo consoles really, I thought this game was a spin off till I realized no big pokemon or Nintendo logo anywhere. They must have threaded the needle to avoid that copyright infringment.
Unfortunately that sounds like a clear cut case. Iirc they have copyright to the creatures themselves, and that case is very straightforward to prove.
Nintendo is going to be watching this motherfucker till the end of time
One extra thing a lot of articles haven’t pointed out is that the mod was locked behind a patreon paywall. Sticking mods behind paywalls has been a hot subject (to put it gently) in the community for a while now. Not to rush to the defense of the most profitable franchise in the world, but yeah that’s absolutely gonna get you shut down.
Paywalled mods are debatable themselves. Throwing one of the most protected IPs that’s ever existed in the mix?
Lmao, yeah. Of course this would happen.
I’m surprised it hasn’t happened to Palworld directly.
My guess is Palworld has done their homework on how to be “legally distinct” enough. It’s quite a different gameplay loop, after all and Nintendo can’t copyright “cute little animals that do the manual labour for the humies” otherwise things like Digimon already wouldn’t exist.
This kinda flies in the face of what I heard the Palworld devs are: a rag-tag handful of nobodies on a budget of $0 making a Steam game in their free time.
I heard they didn’t even use a version control system because they didn’t know how to use one, they just put a copy of the code repo on a flash drive once a day, and when they ran out of drives, they went to the store to buy more.
If even a slightly less embellished version of half of what I’ve heard is true, I wager none of these people got anywhere near a lawyer before putting this game out.
