‘Cold-Blooded Business’: Nintendo Is Patent Trolling Palworld Because It Got Too Big
‘Cold-Blooded Business’: Nintendo Is Patent Trolling Palworld Because It Got Too Big
Japan games industry analyst explains why Nintendo is going after Palworld, and why it’s probably going to win.
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.
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.
Plug for the game cassette beasts! An excellent monster collecting game that feels like a natural progression from early Pokemon
Shhh! Don't alert Nintendo.
Valid competition vs a super corpo that milked the cow dry. Of course their going to be evil about it.
If Nintendo actually wins this, I will - as someone who grew up with Pokémon - destroy them as a company. I will slander them into submission if I have to, fuck them if I can't even have a circus to go with my bread.
"No bread, no cake, no circus." - Nintendo
who made ni no kuni?
Level-5
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.
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.
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.
What? Instead of them acting bad and overprotective about their games, you'd rather the games didn't exist at all? That doesn't make sense. There are problems with the company, but they still make good games. It's not like they mistreat their employees or anything (as far as I'm aware).
Question: What happens if they do disappear like you want? Nintendo fans stop getting the games they like... and how does this benefit everyone else?
Also saying someone deserves to be scammed because they are uninformed is weird. Some people just don't read gaming discourse and reviews, they're not obligated to. And some people actually like the games despite their flaws, but that doesn't mean they don't deserve a better game.
First, they are not overprotective with their games. They are suing for patent infringement over bullshit because in Japan they own patents for things as stupid as "riding a creature in a game". And this is what's happening here. They are hampering progress because they want to be the only one in the monster catching genre. They can vigorously fuck off.
If Nintendo disappears, someone else will come. So many companies died and nothing happened. It's a videogame, they're not making life-saving devices.
If someone buys a Pokémon game now they are rarely uninformed, they are rewarding a company for their shitty behaviour. It's not the first Pokémon and it's not the first time Nintendo acts shitty. But their fanatics will keep defending the company no matter what. At that point, what else can you expect? It's like buying an EA game and then crying because it's full of micro transactions and useless dlcs, etc.
Also, yeah, if you're uninformed and get scammed over stuff that's been happening for years, it's all on you. Fool me once and all that.
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.
I think that conclusion is being come to because Nintendo has a really bad history with patent and legal abuse
Patents are cancer for software, I'll side with Carmack before Nintendo any day.
Nah. Unless these guys literally stole the code, Nintendo can fuck right off.
If you can't beat them, sue them. 🤔
The Nintendo way. If someone else is making money, make that your money instead
Nintendo are trolls and have been doing this for a while whenever the competition scared them, before Palworld they sued White Cat Project to give an upper hand to their own Dragalia Lost, that came years later.
I'm glad Dragalia closed down, fuck Nintendo.
Nintendo literally created a patent this year and waited for it to get approved before suing palworld a month after. Clowns over at Nintendo.
I was a Nintendo fan my entire life. I literally own almost every Nintendo console (no vrboy). Nintendo made the unfortunate decision to not create quality games, but to litigate for profit. I will never go back to Nintendo so long as they still have Gary Bowser's life in their hands. Nintendo has lost life long fans over their action towards competitors, and their inability to make a quality game(say what you want but Pokémon is half assed compared to palworld). I look forward to the eventual bankruptcy filing from Nintendo. I might buy Mario.
Well now I’m hoping that the Switch 2 has a working emulator within a handful of months after release.
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.
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.