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Nintendo plans to sue Palworld-maker Pocketpair
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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Fuck Nintendo but they do have a point here. You can only get so far with artistic inspiration until it becomes straight up plagiarism.
They are suing over a patent though (ie, a technology). What you are talking about is a copyright suit.
Unfortunately we don’t know what patents Nintendo is suing over. And I struggle to think of a patent issue that would generate a good faith claim.
Yes, from I've read they haven't quoted any specific patent to anyone. They don't have good grounds, they just want it shut down.
~~Looks like it's over the game mechanics of 'releasing a creature into a 3d environment and having it perform a contextual task' & 'having a rideable mount switch to a different rideable mount depending on terrain'~~
~~I don't think either of these would work in the US, because you can't protect game mechanics here, but I'm not sure about Japan's take.~~
Edit: I missed that this was still under speculation at the time of the post:
https://bulbagarden.net/threads/nintendo-and-the-pokemon-company-jointly-file-lawsuit-for-patent-infringement-against-palworld-creator-pocketpair-inc-in-the-tokyo-district-court.303354/
They haven't actually said what the alleged infringement is yet, so we can't know for sure what excuse they're going to come up with. They haven't even told Pocketpair!
You are correct, I missed that it was still under speculation.
Kinda wild that you could patent a super basic mechanic that pretty much anyone could come up with
Pocketpair has a pretty good case against Nintendo here, I think, because other games have used these things before.
I know it was never actually released, but Scalebound had a mechanic that would have allowed a player to tell their dragon to perform a task, albeit, usually destructively.
Guild Wars 2 Added a mechanic years ago that let players traverse water and land by automatically a switching between mounts.
'Releasing' a creature into a 3d environment has been done by every minion-mancer class in an MMO since the dawn of the genre.
Okay they need to lose that first one wtf.
Presumably, since Nintendo isn't claiming copyright infringement, Palworld hasn't crossed the line of plagiarism. They are all legally distinct designs.
It doesn't resemble plagiarism in any way.
They are fully entitled to imitate the art style.
I don't agree with that at all - that's how art works. You take ideas and techniques and copy them, adding your own twist in the process. Art is about more than the aesthetic - the backstory is what gives it value. Stealing that is plagiarism, everything else is artistic inspiration... If you add nothing new you've made a cheap knockoff, which is very different from plagiarism
Palworld has its own lore, its own type system, its own battle mechanics, and as far as gameplay it's nothing like Pokemon. All it has in common is many creatures you capture in a ball, with designs largely based on IRL animals and Japanese folklore. They've made something new no matter how you slice it