‘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.
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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.
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.