- cross-posted to:
- 404media@rss.ponder.cat
- cross-posted to:
- 404media@rss.ponder.cat
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.
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I think people are jumping to the conclusion way too fast. We should wait and see what the actual case is about before making judgements.
This is not business. This is extortion. Palworld has opened a can of worms with a realization that gamers don’t need Pokemon anymore. There can be better alternatives.
I mean, the bar is on the ground at this point at best.
It was a painful process, having my love of Pokémon games slowly stripped away until I finally gave up on them. It’s hard giving up on something that you’ve loved from childhood. Pokémon used to be my comfort game and it’s now unplayable trash.
The only reason I still have my Switch at all right now is the Zelda franchise because I currently lack the means to emulate. And the occasional sale item from the eShop because I’m not paying full price for a Switch game ever again after they ruined Pokémon.
I’m surprised no one’s brought up the hellscape we know as the Nintendo eShop. It’s >90% trash.
Nintendo is one of the worst companies in the videogames world. They need to fail, and I really hope this next switch becomes something worse than WiiU and they disappear from the world.
However, they won’t. Their fanatics won’t let them. So I can only hope they double down in their anti consumer behaviour to screw as many customers as they can. Because honestly? If after all these years you keep buying a Pokémon game, you deserve to be scammed and abused as a customer.
My hot take is that even before they flushed their goodwill down the toilet, they were a mediocre company. “Here, buy our 500 dollar console with graphics worse than your phone so you can play the Mario game that we added a magic hat to.”
Worst and most expensive products in the industry.
There’s no doubt they’ve created some very good games in the past. Some of their games have become the standard in their genre, and some others have created a new genre even.
But that can’t justify their shitty behavior. Especially now that they only create crap. Sure, breath of the wild was huge, made some incredible things, etc. But what else? Mario Odyssey is just mario 64 v.2, animal crossing? Let’s not talk about that shit, and I think Pokémon doesn’t even deserve to be mentioned.
Show me a platformer as good as Mario Odyssey not counting A Hat in Time, and I might stop buying from Nintendo. Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are great games too. Saying that they don’t offer anything valuable is misguided.
You have to buy their shitty overpriced console to play those. The value nosedives.
And psychonauts 1/2 are right there.
Mario Odyssey is just Mario 64-2. New gimmicks on a traditional platformer. Not saying that it’s bad, but it’s not a masterpiece either.
Breath of the wild, sure. One of the greatest games made by Nintendo, it redefined the open world genre, but tears of the kingdom is just more of the same, now with cars.
They offer something valuable? Sure… Sometimes they do something good, but the amount of bullshit they bring the videogames world is so big that any good thing they make is strongly eclipsed by the rest of what they do.
most expensive products in the industry.
Counter point: PS5 Pro is au$1200 vs Switch OLED for au$540
Counter counterpoint Ps5 pro is modern hardware. Switch internals were outdated at launch and they still cost the same as 7 years ago.
Ps: I do believe Ps5 pro is stupidly overpriced, but that doesn’t mean Switch isn’t.
Edit: typo
They need to fail, and I really hope this next switch becomes something worse than WiiU and they disappear from the world.
However, they won’t. Their fanatics won’t let them.
Nintendo is famously one of the most cash rich companies out there. A fiscal report from last year indicated they had USD$9 billion in liquid assets.
Nintendo isn’t going anywhere anytime soon and it has very little to do with whether or not fanatics “let them”.
Well, I mean, if they are that rich, I’m partial to thinking that it’s their fanatics’ fault buying every shit they release. If a Pokémon game, being as bad as they are, keeps selling in the millions, nobody but their customers is to blame.
I have been boycotting nintendo for a while now. But it seems that for most people, they don’t care how horrid a company is so long as they get to consume.
The best example of this is Disney.
What makes Disney particularly difficult to boycott is that it is a monopoly.
My money’s on the balls, Nintendo always likes to kick the balls.
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.
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.
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.
Making hundreds of millions of dollars isn’t big?
I think this is a bad take, and the interviewer seems to contradict himself. He suggests that Nintendo goes after companies who copy them, but also mentions another company they’ve sued for patent infringement for a game that didn’t resemble any Nintendo property. So it seems like it has less to do with whether or not you “trigger the wrath of Nintendo”, and more whether you use their patents or not.
It should be noted that this is all just conjecture from somebody not related to the case at all. Nothing in this interview reveals any details about the actual case in question.
Their patents are not for technological innovative things at all but are for things like "presenting a confirmation pop-up window after resuming a game from sleep” or for in a isometric game projecting a shadow for a character that’s behind something so that the player know it’s there.
They’re the kind of obvious solutions that any expert in that domain would develop independently if asked to solve that problem, and patent applications for shit like that would be laughed out of the Patent Office anywhere else than Japan (and in the US before their Patent System went to shit in the late 90s).
I very much doubt this shit is valid in Europe unless there’s some kind of Treaty that means Japanese patents also apply here. If taken to court in the US such patents would most likely be invalidated - the problem in the US is that the Patent Office will accept any old bollocks obvious to doman experts and containing zero innovation, not that Patent Law actually protects this shit and they will be upheld if somebody has the money needed to dispute them in to Court.
However this is Japan and the Japanese Patent System, so it’s probably rotten to the core.
