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‘Cold-Blooded Business’: Nintendo Is Patent Trolling Palworld Because It Got Too Big
(www.404media.co)
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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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.
Making hundreds of millions of dollars isn't big?
That's not how you measure the size of a company. Compare how many employees they have with Nintendo.
The premise is that Palworld got too big, not Pocketpair.
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:
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.
And still, Nintendo can't sue for copyright (or doesn't want to) which is interesting, because if it was such an evident rip off as everything says and the case was so clear, why wouldn't they go that way?
There's inspiration in the monsters, but what else? Is Pokémon an open world with survival mechanics? Can Pokémon carry weapons?
The problem is still the fact that Nintendo has these patents. That is the issue here. I wouldn't argue if they made a copyright claim, but they are doing a scummy thing and they are setting a precedent that's dangerous. Basically they're telling a new player in Japanese business "hey, we're the big fish, we own the place, you don't have business here, go away".
Yeah, the "chilling effect" is a big problem. I'm sure the creators of TemTem and other alternatives are getting nervous.
I guess we'll never know whether Palworld could have avoided this with a different art style or varying the catching mechanics more.
Nintendo even owns a patent for "riding a creature" in a game. That is such a broad concept that a normal parent system shouldn't allow because of how broad it is. It's just dumb. And Nintendo is taking advantage of it.
Edit: temtem is not Japanese, and any other patent office in the world will laugh at Nintendo if they tried to make a claim in their countries, but since Palworld is Japanese as Nintendo, they can make the claim there.