Palworld confirms ‘disappointing’ game changes forced by Pokémon lawsuit
(www.videogameschronicle.com)
from simple@lemm.ee to games@lemmy.world on 08 May 12:38
https://lemm.ee/post/63395664
from simple@lemm.ee to games@lemmy.world on 08 May 12:38
https://lemm.ee/post/63395664
With the implementation of Patch v0.5.5 this week, we must make yet another compromise. From this patch onward, gliding will be performed using a glider rather than with Pals. Pals in the player’s team will still provide passive buffs to gliding, but players will now need to have a glider in their inventory in order to glide.
How lame. Japan needs to fix its patent laws, it’s ridiculous Nintendo owns the simple concept of using an animal to fly.
threaded - newest
I mean… Patents in general are bullshit just for things like this.
There’s a parasitic egg layer that uses leaves some get put into birds and then get shit out? Why isn’t Nintendo suing these insects for using birds to fly around?
Japanese ones are particularly worse. In the US a successful defense is prior art, there is no such defense in Japan.
This lawsuit is so stupid. In my opinion, patenting, copyrighting, or trademarking concepts or mechanics in video games shouldn’t be allowed at all. The nemesis system in the Shadow of Mordor games was so cool, but we’re never going to see anything like it again. Warner went through the trouble to copyright (or something idk I’m not a lawyer) that system, and then let the series die out.
I’m waiting to see the headlines that any other games with a shooty thing that goes bang is illegal, and the concept of shooting a gun in a video game is going to be owned by either Rockstar/Take Two or the collective mob of Call of Duty developers. If the world is gonna get that stupid, I got my fingers crossed that Bubsy 3D owns the rights to jumping
Edit: Thought about it for 10 more seconds and I have questions. Is it specifically gliding using a creature that Nintendo has a problem with, or is it creature-assisted traversal in general? Can they sue Skyrim since you can ride horses? Palworld made the change so that you need to build a glider to glide around. BOTW and TOTK used gliders. Is Nintendo gonna sue them for that now too? I fucking hate all of this so God damned much
I’m unconvinced that the Nemesis system would have worked well in too many other settings, but one game patent that had a tangible effect on the industry was Bandai-Namco’s patent on loading screen mini games. Remember how you could make the Soul Calibur II characters yell stuff while the match loaded? Funny that we didn’t see it again until Street Fighter 6, isn’t it? Conveniently after a patent would have expired. We went through an entire era of games with load times that could have benefited from mini games, and by the time the patent expired, we had largely come up with ways to get rid of load screens altogether.
Well saying the nemesis system wouldn’t have worked well in other games is almost assuming that it wouldn’t be changed or evolved to fit other genres. People forget that the real damage some patents/copyrights do is not in their explicit existence, it’s the sphere of influence they exert on related concepts entirely. We weren’t just robbed of the nemesis system, we were robbed of anything even slightly resembling it.
And I feel like once you understand that you realize it can be adapted to greater things. Spider Man games could have used it. Assassins creed would have been an amazing place for experimentation with those ideas. Could be adapted to Star Wars games, dragons dogma, yakuza, borderlands. And it doesn’t need to be a central focus of these games like it was with the WB games. But even the concept of having enemies that kill you be leveled up in some way is now tainted.
Maybe it is a lack of imagination on my part, but that mechanic seems to rely heavily on characters that can be killed and come back to life with a vengeance on a regular basis, which I don’t think makes sense in any of the settings you listed except for Borderlands, with its New-U stations, funny enough. You could adapt it into something where both you and an enemy are defeated non-lethally, I suppose, but that’s a concept that strangely doesn’t have a common template in video games.
Spiderman and Batman are literally famous for not killing their enemies, so I think your first sentence is way more than a maybe.
Horizon Zero Dawn would have been awesome with a nemesis system, especially if it was applied to the robo-dinosaurs. You could have the in-universe justification that a particular robot uploads its consciousness upon death and downloads into a new body, and now it remembers how you killed it before and it will adapt accordingly. Start having epic robots that know you, and you have to keep an eye out for them, but also upon being destroyed they could dispense better scraps.
The tried to patent fucking MOUNTS. Someone get square and blizzard on the sue-train and ream Nintendo a new one.
Who the hell in their right mind would want to buy a switch after seeing this?
All the nintendo boot licking neckbearded incels that you see defending the company like if its their own.
Children will, from their parents who don’t see these articles or care, just that their kid is entertained… Don’t be an ass.
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I have already boycotted Nintendo, but nice try? I’m on PC and steam deck.
Also a lot of these concerns were not major issues when the switch 1 came out. So I don’t really go off the switch 1 ownership results since Nintendo seems to have done some serious damage to themselves in the past 1-3 years alone.
Even that group is a tiny minority. Most buyers are people who just want to play Nintendo games and don’t care about anything else.
most consumers don’t care, that’s why they’re consumers. Switch 2 is gonna sell gangbusters and no amount of frivolous lawsuits is going to put a dent in that.
Plus you still have people mad at Palworld for no reason other than they think it “copied” Pokémon, like the guy getting downvoted into oblivion.
I won’t, unless I can buy one 2nd hand AND there’s a way to jailbreak it
It’s the using a creature to glide that’s the specific problem this time. Not the “using a creature” per se, but “pressing a button to instantly summon a non-player-controlled game-creature to allow for gliding, which is instantly dismissed once the player touches the ground” or something like that in the patent
Which is equally insane, no?
Yes, the more you read the patent the more you just want to grab whoever approved it and force them to explain how and why it deserved it, despite lots of prior implementations.
As far as I understand patent law, if nobody has actually patented something someone can just say “mine lol” and scoop up royalties and block shit for spite.
Introduce a .5 second delay before dismissing the creature upon touching the ground.
it’s even more stupid because that’s not how the mount works in Pokémon anyway
It’s how it works in Legends: Arceus, isn’t it?
As described in the patent, yes. You press one button, you start riding said mount. If it’s glider mount, it automatically changes to the stag once you touch the ground OR to the fish if you fall to the water.
Palworld never had this “automatic change from one mount to another”, at best it was the glider pals that you didn’t have to manually summon in order to glide and went away once you touched the ground or water. I’ve skimmed the patent a few times, but I don’t recall it having a case for going from creature-assisted-gliding to back on foot
Iirc sony has a patent on an input device having two separate data streams. It seems you write the most general thing you can on patents and patent offices don’t care
Amazon has a patent on the “one click purchase” button…
Unfortunately, at least in the US (and from the sound of it, probably Japan), the patent office has the viewpoint of ‘patent everything and let the courts sort them out.’ The courts, on the other hand, defer to the patent office because ‘it’s they’re job so they must know what they’re doing.’
It’s not allowed at all in board games. There’s a known issue that someone could completly copy the mechanics of a board game, and as long as they don’t copy the art or the exact text of the rulebook there is no legal means to stop it.
Boardgamers are aware of this, and agree that it is better for development of future games than if someone could own the idea of “rolling a dice”, so if knockoffs do come around they tend to quickly get called out and not purchased.
I don’t know how videogames managed to get different rules.
That’s probably Richard Garfield’s fault for setting precedent with his collectable card game patent.
A lot of people in those offices really don’t understand the technical mumbo jumbo that can be summed up as “doing something that already exists, but on a computer”
Like scanning a document on a printer and immediately sending it as email. That was patented
They could simply have the pals hold on to gliders that the players can use and nothing would change in the gameplay…
Cowards, you haven’t lost a legal battle yet so what the fuck are you doing
Legal battles aren’t exactly cheap and they can drag on for years. Pocket Pair could end up bankrupt in the meantime from excessive legal costs, while Nintendo can keep that shit going for decades.
Sounds like a system in need of reform.
Looks like people with money can just use the law to bully those without.
Copyright and patent laws need to die.
Since when is flying on a monster patentable. What a bunch of bullshit. Nintendo has really used up the last of any good will the company had. I will not be giving them a dime from here on out.
Yeah, Nintendo seems to think they are untouchable. They can do whatever, charge whatever, not even innovate anymore with the Switch 2, and attack fans. I’m done with Nintendo, the only way I’ll ever play any of their games is on the high seas.
Palworld dev dares Nintendo to sue. Nintendo sues. Palworld bends over. Seems like everyone got what they wanted.
The first attempt to sue was over copyright. Nintendo figured it had no grounds, so it went for patent bullshit
Palworld picked a fight with a bigger fish. The law doesn’t care about morals.
They didn’t start the fight. They were sued. If you think “picking a fight with Nintendo” is something you can do any time, and on your own volition, you must be missing something.
I finally decided to look into it. I didn’t find any statements matching my claim.
Patents should last 10 years instead of 20, and digital patents even less.
I can see why patents are so long when you need to build like a billion dollar factory to make a product and mass produce it.
Digital concepts don’t take that much investment and once you have it you don’t need to invest in making more, it’s just there.
So yes, digital patents should be a fraction of the time that physical patents should be. Like 2 years instead of 20.
2 years seems like a nightmare for indie developers. Do you want a bunch of AI Chinese cash grabs pushing things out like Hollow Knight 2: Microtransaction Edition or Stardew Valley Romance Sims? Because without IP protection, indie developers will get creamed.
I don’t remember all of the differences, but I think you’re conflating copyright, patent, and trademark here. Software patents should almost not be a thing, but copyright and trademark should still exist.
Copyright if elements of the game such as 3D models, images and code have been copied.
Trademark if the name of the game is used (i.e. “Stardew Valley Romance Sims”).
Patents for game mechanics.
As a side note, personally I think that game mechanics shouldn’t be at all patentable
in most countries, afaik, you actually can’t patent game mechanics, for the same reason you can’t patent rule sets for boardgames:
because they are essentially just logical connections. it would be like patenting math, which is also not allowed, for very obvious reasons. (with some very specific, very niche exceptions)
japan is just plain weird and wrong about their patent system.
that’s why all of the lawsuits about this stuff are happening in japan; not just because that’s where the companies are, but because japanese copyright law is (especially) fucked.
I don’t believe those indie developers have any patents.
You don't need a patent to protect the IP of a game. That's what copyright is for.
Digital patents should not exist. Period.
For trivial software features like these, definitely not. I think patents start to make sense in the area of really advanced algorithms, like SAT solvers, ML, and so on. So conditional on patents in general making sense, those kinds of patents seem legit to me.
Copyright and patent laws should go away entirely.
Fuck you, Nintendo. Release a fucking decent Pokemon game instead of lawyering the competition that’s offering a more desirable product
It’s the capitalism way.
“The company with the best, cheapest product will come out on top… Unless the shittier company has more money and lawyers and then they sue everyone else into the ground for even attempting to break into the market.”
How is it that pokemon has a hold on things like animals allowing flight, but gliders allowing flight isn’t under patent?
Like, whoever did gliders first needs to sue Nintendo to change breath of the wild, no gliders allowed anymore.
Wonder who owns the rights to Fly Boy now?
Can’t they just release free DLC with those features worldwide exlcuding Japan where those patents are enforceable ?
That would be a nice “fuck you,” but it’s probably not worth the extra effort to them.
The spectacle of it would certainly boost sales for a little bit. How much and whether it covers the development time, who knows.
I’d do it on principle alone, but I’m a petty bitch.
It would be neat if modders put all the “patent-infringing” stuff back in.
I’m sure they will.
And as long as none of them try profiting off it, Nintendo has no leg to stand on with their usual C&D bullshit.
That’s another thing if they could allow specific api and opensource those parts they remove so someone can create mod that brings all of this back. Like we removed it but we make those things opensource, do what you want, we don’t care. It’s not in paid version of our app.
Most companies do stuff like that but pocketpair is based in Japan so they can’t, they’d be held accountable.
I think everyone understands that nintendo are bad guys in this this situation but pocketpair is just scared. They just say we want to get over it as soon as possible to focus on our game. I understand that small company is scared of old, long timer in this business. But they need to turn it over because if they behave like a sheep they will be eaten by wolf.
If they could change narrative and simply add. We removed those things and replaced it with this but we don’t care what you do with our game. Here is api. Do what the fuck you want.
Sorry, I meant that most companies do fixes to comply with local legislations/sentences and then ignore them everywhere else, Pocketpair can’t do that because they are being sentenced in their home jurisdiction, so their infractions in other jurisdictions could and would still be brought to court.
Serves the Palworld devs right. This is what happens when one blatantly plagiarizes, and I am here for it.
We are talking about gliding on a mount…a very common game feature…
Well I am talking about the blatant plagiarism, which is what the devs for Palworld did.
Summoning creatures from an object is hardly “blatant plagiarism”. Many, many, many games have the ability to summon creatures from an object. Pokemon was certainly not the first one to do it…
What will you argue if I bring up the fact that they ripped off countless Pokemon?
Oh wait.
I don’t care because I am not here to argue with someone who doesn’t understand what plagiarism is. Luckily the courts do, and ruled on the case. :)
The case case isn’t about character designs, the case is about patents Nintendo filed after PocketPair released a game with said mechanics. The idea that one should be able to patent a game mechanic someone else has already released in their games is BS. Japan’s patent system sucks and Nintendo sucks for abusing it.
Whatever you say bud.
The courts ruled it isn’t plagerism. So… You’re looking pretty stupid here.
The patents in question have nothing to do with creature designs. And neither would patent law be covering the design of creatures. That would be copyright law.
Weird how they are overhauling their game if the courts ruled in favour of them eh?
Buddy, quit while you’re
aheadnot too far behind. You’re just proving what @Tattorack@lemmy.world said: you don’t understand the difference between patents, copyright, and trademarks..
You really are that stupid, huh?
OK, let’s do a little exercise; how many of their creature designs have been changed since launch?
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the difference here is that a ton of other creature collector games have done something similar when it comes to summoning them. Coromon is the first one thst pops up in my head.
what makes palworld different? it genuinely sold well, enough to challenge Nintendo and it’s monopoly with their Pokémon games. Which they barely put any effort in nowadays because they sell regardless because of brand loyalty
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Go touch some grass, both of you.
Except it doesn’t. Nintendo was only able to do this by exploiting Japanese-specific patent law since Palworld is made by a Japanese company. They had no case otherwise.
“They wouldn’t have a case if they didn’t use local law” is a crazy argument.
Glide with a glider in your inventory like Zelda? Is that patented?
The last Nintendo console I bought was the Nintendo DS lite. The last Nintendo product I bought was Age of Empires DS The Age of Kings.
As you can probably tell, that was a rather long time ago. Since getting my first TTDS flash card I’ve more or less exclusively pirated Nintendo things. I’ll just continue doing that.
News like this isn’t giving me any remorse.
I’ve only pirated old stuff, games from my youth that are collectible items now for silly money or a complete crapshoot on whether 30 year old tech has stood the test of time.
If I had the time to play them I would definitely see my conscience clear on pirating new stuff from them now.
I jailbroke my Switch after they went after Yuzu in March last year. Every time I read about them, it makes pirating new games on it more satisfying. I’m really gonna enjoy Metroid Prime 4 on it!
I pirated breath of the wild years ago and still haven’t beaten it.
I ended up replaying and finishing Wind Waker on Dolphin though.
Based.
We need more anti-consumers like yourself. This is how we fight back.
Wouldn’t a game mechanic/animation like that be equivalent to a stunt in a movie?
Like, imagine if a film director wanted to blow up a car in his movie, but was getting sued by Paramount because Michael Bay already blew up a car in Transformers.
Nintendo ownes the IP of hangliders now.
Nintendo will never see another cent from me for this petty bullshit. My kids will play with other toys.
Nintendo can sue me any day, I’m out here making RC hang gliders and making tiny 3 second games where the only purpose is to pull out a glider and put it away instantly.
This is why we should’ve been pirating from the beginning.
All the money we give these scumfucks is being used against us.
Wait i can’t fly on Pals now?
Does that mean that Ark can’t fly on dinosaurs?
Pretty sure you can still mount and fly on flying pals.
There are some pals that can be used as gliders though, that is what is being patched out.
TIL. Good. Cause I liked my spaceship dragon
You have been nominated for Best Sentences of 2025. Congratulations.
Oh man, let me know when the rewards are named so I can give a speech.
First, I’d like to thank ADHD
Nintendo is just a garbage lawsuit company that sometimes makes hardware with stupid subscriptions attached.
and none of it matters, cause they have literal legions of fans that will ride their ride, no matter how much it costs, no matter how poorly made it is, no matter how much nintendo spits in their face.
So Nintendo sees no significant economic repercussions from their behavior, and thus has incentive to change.
I was one of those but they were losing me more and more every year… But 3 years ago it became way too much, and I got off the bandwagon. Screw that lol.
I hope they don’t make as many sales as they expect… But you may be right, too many people who will buy their crap however expensive and how much they’re being mistreated by the company.
I’m not so sure.
All of my friends who are less pissed off at Nintendo than I am are not even considering buying a Switch 2 because Nintendo basically priced themselves out of the market. All of my friends who have a Switch 1 will not be buying the Switch 2, that’s pretty significant IMO, but I guess we’ll see.
I agree, they definitely priced themselves out of several demographics including casual gamers, parents of young children gamers, and “I guess I’ll get a switch as a second device” gamers. These people aren’t going to look at a switch that’s roughly the same price as the ps5 and xbox and think “yeah let’s grab that one”.
The wii u showed their demographic of “die hard fans that buy no matter what” is actually really small compared to the rest of their sales. And I think we’re going to see a repeat of that.
I hope it does worse than the Wii U tbh, Nintendo needs to be knocked down quite a few pegs. I am quite fed up with them.
Its also fucked up that the switch is still 300 dollars, despite being released over 8 years ago.
What happened to consoles getting cheaper? You know their cost to manufacture it isnt the same as it was 8 years ago.
Saw this the other day, that part isn’t as much their fault.
lemmy.linuxuserspace.show/post/673986
I bought a WiiU refurbished directly from Nintendo shortly before the Switch came out. I did it purely because the first big hax was released and I was able to easily port my GC\Wii hacked HDD to it AND also have WiiU games hacked games available. WW and TWP were also a big part of that purchase decision for me.
I got a Switch and BotW ultimate CE on release, but will be skipping the S2 for some time. Likely until the next Zelda comes out if the Steam Deck can’t easily emulate other S2 titles by that time. I’m bummed I’ll be missing the new DK game (only 10GB file size though so not very big) and Hyrule Warriors game as the last one was amazing, but it’s a basic beat em up so no love really lost there.
and for every one like you.
Theres people who buy multiple of the console.
One person in my family bought 4 of the Nintendo Switch. One for him, his wife, and one each for each of their two grand kids.
and they also buy multiple copies of games, so they don’t have to worry about wanting to play a game someone else is already playing.
and I would not be shocked at all if they buy at least two of the Switch 2 the second it becomes commonly available.
Lemmy constantly falls into the same social trap as reddit: that we think we’re some monolith of consumerism and when we believe something we think everyone else will be on our side.
Go on YouTube and look up the hundreds of videos from the past few months alone of scalpers and other Pokemon buyers getting into actual physical fights, buying literally 10+ of those huge box sets, and camping out at those vending machines and buying literally everything in them the minute they restock.
I’m a vendor at comic and anime conventions here in the US. I did a show last month that was literally 99% Pokemon cards and merch, and everyone was buying that shit up regardless. There were actually maybe five booths including my own that weren’t selling just Pokemon stuff, if at all.
I dont know why you are whinging about this when literally no one is making this claim. In fact, we are talking about the exact opposite of it.
Yes, thats the legions of people we were talking about, before you came in with this weird tangent.
I was agreeing with you with my anecdotal experience.
The comment you replied to said Nintendo is going to lose customers over this, while your comment said Nintendo fans are still gonna be their dumb shitty selves by buying multiple of the same system or even game. Where does my comment diverge from that line of thinking?
ETA: the consumerism claim was just something that I’ve noticed between reddit and Lemmy. Reddit might have thousands of users in one sub, while Lemmy only might have a few hundred. Both sites/whatever you call the collective of Lemmy, constantly think that people will go along with their beliefs about boycotting certain games/not buying certain products for whatever reason; when the fact of reality is that both of these places are actual echo chambers full of common denominators, and we need to face reality.
I think they will lose customers over this, sure, but nowhere near enough to make them reconsider being the biggest a-holes in gaming (take that 2nd place, EA)
That’s what I’m saying.
Am I typing in some alien language?
I don’t think Nintendo has as many die hards as you think. The wii and switch had over 100 million sales. The wii u had 13 million.
<img alt="" src="https://aussie.zone/pictrs/image/92ba385f-6a15-424d-81ba-1b7ce35289d1.png">
Now look at switch game sales, scroll past their major IPs and pokemon games, and once again the sales show around 13 million or less.
On wii u mario kart had 8 million sales, and not one other game passed 6 million.
The wii, wii u and switch all had around 3 million sales in their first quarter and didn’t really pass that 13 million mark in their first year.
If only die hard fans that buy no matter what buy it, I think it absolutely will be a problem for them. And I think it has a real chance of happening. Half my casual gamer friends didn’t even know switch 2 was a thing, and the ones that did know about it said they haven’t seen any reason to get it yet, especially at the prices they’re seeing.
The reality is, the family and casual markets are what carried them whether they like it or not. Not the rabbid fans. And like with the wii u, if they don’t appeal to those markets properly, they won’t sell well.
Shit like this is why I haven’t bought a Nintendo product in many years.
They might think it’s keeping their profits up, but it’s hurting their business, as a lot more people than me feel the exact same way.
I’m a little torn on this.
On the one hand, let’s be real - clearly PalWorld takes more than a little “inspiration” on a bunch of different Pokemon IP. The illustrations, modeling, and just visual style overall matches in many ways almost perfectly for many of the creatures. They are like off-brand versions of Pokemon with the exact same eyes, mouth types, etc. in many cases as if they were illustrated by Ken Sugimori himself<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/4e6a9e85-e9ae-4407-86b2-7aadae1a5943.jpeg">.
Additionally, the game involves using handheld ball devices thrown at wild world-roaming creatures you capture after cutting down their health by some amount to increase the catch percentage and different “grade” balls have increased chance for capture.
There is also a nefarious organization competing with you for capturing these wild creatures like Team Rocket.
But on the OTHER hand, the leveling up, breeding, base-building, the various ability tech-trees, item crafting, and just overall engine complexity is VASTLY superior to what appears to now be an almost EMBARRASSINGLY behind set of game design mechanics in the actual Pokemon games… it’s sort of a Saints Row vs GTA IV situation here where they were an obvious copy off, but improved in enough ways that ended up being a fun game in itself.
Copying off exact art asset styles is one thing you shouldn’t do… but taking Nintendo’s gameplay ideas and expanding upon them vastly and being told to remove said mechanics as if they stole code is asinine and sets a bad precedent.
Every time there’s been a popular game, there are a thousand copies off them that twist and evolve those mechanics until something else comes along.
Nintendo came along with platformers after Pitfall on Atari. Sonic copied 2D platforming basics from Mario like running to the right and jumping on enemies but changed so much. Final Fantasy copied off Dragon Quest, which itself was a digital idea based off of Dungeons & Dragons. Doom to games like GoldenEye to Halo to Call of Duty to PUBG to Fortnite to APEX Legends…
This feels like taking advantage of grey area in the realm of visual IP similarity to shut down someone making their gameplay design mechanics look antiquated by comparison.
Really embarrassing for Nintendo to be doing this, when clearly what Nintendo should be doing is doing like what Fortnite did when APEX came along and added location / enemy / weapon call outs and just STEALING the mechanics they weren’t clever enough to think of on their own and implement better versions in their own games… but clearly they’d just rather have a monopoly and continue lackluster work.
There are over 1,000 pokemon. I think it’s a Tolkien situation- where famously, you can’t write fantasy without using ingredients that Tolkien created, because if you do, obviously it’s from Tolkien, and if you didn’t, the reader is asking why not? That kinda deal.
If you set out to create a game involving collecting, or even looking at and cataloguing, a bunch of different fantasy creatures, you’re going to have some that are at least a little similar to pokemon. The electibuzz/grizzbolt example you gave is a fantastic one. You’re claiming it’s stolen, but that there is a cat creature with a single lightning bolt in it’s belly. Versus a… monkeything? Covered in them. My point here being, even if they didn’t steal (which, I’m sure they did, there are other, better examples) at a certain point you have to accept that with 1,000 pokemon, there’s going to be overlap, so you either need to just be up front about the stealing, or you need to spend 5x the amount of development time making sure none of your creatures have overlap.
Personally, Pokemon has been around for more than 25 years. Even if they released a million games a year, they shouldn’t get to gatekeep ‘all creature-collection simulators that you use balls for and that you can ride like a dragon.’ Fuck that. They got infinite money back on their initial investment, and they shouldn’t be allowed to just own the ideas. This is the kind of bullshit that makes me (a lifelong pokemon fan) want to never, ever, ever give them money again.
I think Cassette Beasts pulled off the Pokemon gameplay format without making anything that Nintendo could try and sue over.
Oooh, thank you for reminding me that game exists. I still haven’t played it, and so many people have told me it’s good!
Add one to the list. Really enjoyable, even fun to cheese, not very fond of the ending but otherwise stellar.
Bingo. In many ways, but not all, palworld was lazy, and unoriginal.
Design wise maybe, but game play wise, performance wise, mechanic wise.
PalWorld is 100% not lazy in these categories and Pokemon is.
My issue with people taking on PalWorld as a copy cat is it’s really a shit argument. PalWorld is a copy cat of Ark and a much better version of Ark.
Change Pals to anything else. Turn the ball into a net and it isn’t a Pokemon copy cat.
Competition is great. My take on this entire thing is fuck Nintendo.
That sounds like a “look someone managed to pull that off so it’s definitely possible” argument. In other words “you can enter the collectable creatures scene by spending that amount of effort”. And it shouldn’t be that way. The price in effort shouldn’t be that high.
Actually, it should be the customers who decide if your product is worth the effort of playing it. There are a lot of rehashed games in various genres (e.g. horrors, walking simulators) and wee see no issue with them even though they are using exactly same mechanics, or sometimes even assets. What matters is users’ reception. If users think your product is worth it - it means you spent enough effort already. If your product would be a low effort creation users wouldn’t spend money on it in the first place.
I’m sure if Cassette Beasts could accumulate that kind of playerbase and profits, Nintendo would’ve sued them too.
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Honestly? I see more Totoro in there than Electabuzz.
Where does the line get drawn between inspiration and stealing? I’m not trying to be facetious, it’s just the kind of question that I think a lot of people will have vastly different answers to.
The line? Usually you need to be doing something conceptually different. This knockoff electrabuzz wouldn’t have raised as many eyebrows if it was in a farming simulator, or a card game.
It’s like if you had a chainsaw gun in your game, and your game was a third person shooter set in a dark gritty sci-fi world where you are fighting subterranean monsters called the Focus Board.
Pokémon TCG would probably make a stink about that too. I would agree that more needs to be done to differentiate them but the Guns and the art-style should do that pretty well.
Using balls to capture and store Pals was a big mistake though and they definitely should’ve made a few more drafts on some of those aspects before reveal.
If you search for a fox fire witch you’ll see different interpretations on that. But somehow Palworld made a fox fire witch extremely close to an art of a fanmade Mega Delphox.
<img alt="delphox comparisson" src="https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/d8471f5a-dcae-4dea-ba65-bc3378e29d01.png">
It’s not an official pokémon but no way in hell they’re didn’t just create the pal based on this art, it’s just too similar.
But that’s not the point of this lawsuit. They patented broad game mechanics and are successfully litigating ownership of those ideas.
I’m not talking about the lawsuit, I’m responding about the idea that eventually people will create monsters that looks similar to Pokémon because of the vast amount of Pokémons, Palworld clearly tried to be close as legally possible.
That VGC site has a pretty good sum up of Palworld: cynical and souless, but nonetheless a pretty fun game to play, and I fully agree. Pretty much every design up to version 0.3 was fully copied from pokemon. The more recent patch that added the big island on the south has more original-looking monster designs, though others are still pretty obvious ripoffs.
They did that on Craftopia, too, only it was to catch animals rather than monsters.
Not really. There is a criminal syndicate, a bunch of violent hypocritical hippies, a corrupt police and some Borderlands style psychos, none “competing” with you, they just want you dead. I think only the syndicate would “count as team rocket”, but they’re up for all crimes.
Palworld became a target at first because of that visual similarity but, as much as the pals obviously resemble pokemons, they’re visually different enough to be considered original and a case on those grounds alone would go nowhere. Which is why Nintendo shifted from IP to Patent bullshit.
At a fundamental level, why should copyright exist? Is it helping society here by incentivizing Nintendo? No. Contemporary copyright has it wrong, and I think your starting assumptions ignore that fact.
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If I spend millions of my own money and hundreds or thousands of hours of my own time to build something, another company should not just be able to yoink that, put a coat of paint on it, and leave me with nothing to show if theirs just happens to get more popular or be advertised a little better. I don't think the current laws are good but, absent basic income and such for everyone, I see why something should exist.
Sorry but why not? If you can’t afford that don’t make it or don’t publish it.
We see with open source that lack of copyright is not restricting anyone’s creativity and ability to create. In fact the open source world is significantly more creative and productive than proprietary one.
open source doesn't pay my mortgage, pay back any business loans, put food on my table, etc. as the sole breadwinner in my family.
To be clear, I have contributed in a minor degree to open source and build things for fun; this is specifically about why copyright exists in certain domains. I also think it should be something more like 3-5 years max. I am a software engineer and used to work in the games industry for a number of years (though not anymore).
Then do something that does? Are we supposed to literally ruin part of society just for your benefit? You’re not entitled to this.
Not being able to steal something someone put a ton of time and/or money into for a couple of years without compensating them at all is ruining society... how exactly?
Here’s where you fail to think when you call this “stealing”. You don’t own intellectual property as it didn’t come from the vacuum of your head. It’s built from millions of other contributors and our collective intelligence.
Don’t like this? You’re free to leave this to people who do and go do something else. No one’s forcing you to do this. You’re not even aware of your own entitlement.
Pokemon straight ripped off mother nature though.
Eh I think patents in video games just ruins the fun for us since Nintendo/game freak/Pokemon whoever can’t make a good game if their lives depended on it.
Look, if the problem is the similar designs then sue for that!
I’m a little torn on your comment, because om the one hand you are right and on the other these lawsuits have nothing to do with the designs or art style at all.
There’s 1025 Pokemon at this point in time - how the hell are you supposed to create a unique pokemon at this point in time? Even pokemon can’t create unique pokemon anymore.
The same way Digimon, Monster Hunter monsters, and every other unique IP looks nothing like Pokemon. Make completely original designs that don’t look like fan art or knock offs of another artist’s specific trademark style.
Earnest question - what trademarks does Nintendo/pokemon have on artistic style?
Any trademarks they need because Nintendo have allegedly been filing new patents mid-lawsuit in order to justify suing palworld.
I just assume that as long as everyone is fine with derivations produced by AI (text, pics, music), all derivations that don’t look exactly like original Pokemon are fine (also real people put some effort into those). Palworld compared to Pokemon is a much better product than, say, Fifa XX compared to Fifa XX-1. Also Pokemon series is notorious for useless editions of the same games masked as separate products - that level of rehashing feels much more illegal to me.
I thought copyright and patent laws were supposed to incentivize innovation, not stifle it.
Just kidding! They always existed to make rich people richer at the expense of useful idiots.
they barely changed the overall “palmon” to the orignal pokemon they stole from. kinda hard to defend palworld when they just copy and pasted, and slightly changed the feature.
I don’t play Palworld, but still hate firms that behaves like this. Not buying Nintendo anymore 🥳 Emulators from here on :)
Patenting common stuff like this is just stupid! Think I read somewhere that Apple patented squares with rounded corners 😂 Hope Nintendo doesn’t use rounded corners in any of their in-game menus.
I though patents were ment to protect important original ideas. Stuff with impact.
I wonder what their plan was – step on the toes of the biggest franchise while operating in one of the many countries with broken copyright laws and then hope for the best while raking in early access money based on an idea that legally can’t exist? Was it being naive and hoping they could just make a fun and successful game and Pokemon would be a merciful god?
Nintendo shouldn’t be trying to own mechanics. if someone took their core idea and made it so good people who are Pokemon fans are buying it en masse then maybe they should take a hint and make a game that people want. but instead they’re out there suing devs for “stealing” their idea of holding onto the feet of creatures with wings to glide? they’re clearly unable to take down the game and decided to blindly keep stabbing away at random things trying to bankrupt them with trivial lawsuits. it’s pathetic
Does your comment make sense as a response to my comment?
I’m confused why the devs stuck their head in the jaws of a sue happy monster. I ask, “But what was the point? What did they plan to happen?”
And you tell me Nintendo shouldn’t own mechanics? Like… I know that. I am so used to people misunderstanding me, that I specifically go back and add a huge banner saying “I agree with you.” I can call Nintendo assholes, call copyright broken, paint the devs as good but naive, and I still get “listen here, Nintendo is bad. Copyright is broken.”
You’re getting down votes from astroturfers, idiots, and kids who can’t handle attacks on their precious favoritist little game, but you’re right, palworld has zero leg to stand on here and they’re lucky their company even still exists with the sheer scale of blatant theft going on. But DAE Nintendo bad hurr hurr?
Can you list out this sheer scale of theft that Nintendo is suing Pocketpair for.
Sure, it’s located at letmegooglethat.com/?q=Nintendo+lawsuit+against+p…
Ah, so you can’t? The scale of the theft is so big that you can’t even list them out, is it?
Just keep moving those goalposts, kiddo.
Please explain what goalpost did I move?
So, Nintendo can file patents after years of not filing them just to fuck with an Indie company after that company put out a product with game mechanics that “infringe said patents”, but not to go after other large gaming companies like Microsoft that also infringe those same patents. Interesting take.
What the hell is wrong with you? Did I say Nintendo ought to be allowed to drive drunk? Or did I express confusion at why someone stepped in front of the speeding drunk? I’m fucking tired of “oh you defended him? What do you love him?” bullshit.
Sorry I didn’t just shake my magic 8 ball and generate a pithy comment like you (probably) did. Here, I’ll shake my ball and write what comes up.
Nintendo is fucking scum. I want a competitor to Pokemon. Copyright laws are broken. Lawyers! LAWYERS!!
Either you haven’t read into what Nintendo is doing and kept up with what’s been going on in the court case, (and perhaps meant to put a /s at the end of your first comment), or you’re blaming Palworld for something Nintendo did because they are big mad that anyone would dare make a game even remotely similar to theirs. I don’t care if you’re defending Nintendo or not.
NINTENDO LITERALLY APPLIED FOR PATENTS FOR GAME MECHANICS used in Palworld after the game was already released to the public. They invented a reason to sue. They directly manufactured it. Your inability to communicate your thoughts on the matter is not my problem. Maybe stop raving for a minute and compose a reply that actually makes sense.
Getting popular to that point was not in their plans. You can’t judge their success.
And yes it can legally exist. See other creature collector games (that are just not that popular yet).
Make it so that you can give the glider pal skins.
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I wonder how much of this game they can force them to change. I know Steam has a 2 hour limit for returns but at what point does this game become “not the game I bought”?
I mean, the game is in early access so if you bought it and are now complaining it changed… It’s a you problem, not something that should be refundable.
Nah, not complaining, idly wondering. I made my bed, I’ll sleep in it, I’m just wondering how far a game can go to change a game and still claim it’s the same game.
Theseus’ Game
There’s and endless list of games people have complained about changing during early access. It’s a stupid idea. Don’t preorder games.
Yuuup, Palworld was a rare early access buy for me. Burned too many times but a sale burnt a hole in my pocket after holding off for years and I got curious, I knew what I was getting into haha
If anyone owes you money, it’s Nintendo. We should class action their asses.
Anytime you can’t access the version of a game you spent money on
Pretty much anything so long as Palworld doesn’t have 1.- a backbone and 2.- a dictionary at hand. Because it is as simple as finding a picture of any of a long list of animals that can glide, state the words “previous art” and they should be free from this ridiculous demand.
Mechanics that already exist in nature should not be copyrightable. Can you imagine if the first videogame company ever patented “character walking”?
they were pretty much in hotwater for copying pokemons likeness, they probably dint want to have more expensive legal and drawn out fight.
So can we please fork v0.5.4?
Nintendo are rightly losing their free pass with gamers.
That is very true, but the Venn Diagram overlap between Gamers^TM^ and ‘Nintendo gamers’ is a rapidly shrinking area.
Heard that before, this happens every decade or so
I've seen no evidence of this. People are clamoring for the switch 2 and talking about all they want to buy. Fuck Nintendo, but people keep giving them money so they're going to keep doing anti-consumer shit with no sign of any government stopping them. The government isn't going to attack one of the most beloved companies in Japan whose mascot they used at their olympics. A lot of Japanese are event against things like free, labour-of-love randomizers made for old games. People need to stop buying their shit globally if they want anything to happen.
that was the same issues with swsh all the way to arceus, people were repeatadly warned how half-assed the games were, and then complain later on the subs. they still bought it.
Where is that? Cause Switch 2 pre orders are sold out.
That has happened my whole life, I’m 44. Nintendo supposedly does low first batch numbers so the can get in the news that they sold out. Then scalpers sell the machines for $1500.
Sure but I don’t see any evidence of Nintendo’s decline. The truth is that gamers are incredibly spineless and will continue to bootlick corporate boot unless they put “something woke in the game” at which point they’ll leave a review somewhere and still clock in 300 hours if entertained enough.
Not how patents work but whatever, Nintendo has more money so they’re in the right
I don’t care about Palworld, but I do hate Nintendo. Enemy of my enemy and all that.
I don’t care about it either personally, but my wife really enjoys playing the game with friends, and I’m pissed on her behalf. Luckily, she’s told me the devs are being really good about making the changes feel good (not like a punishment).
Palworld did more for the monster-collecting genre in one early access title than Pokémon has in the last decade of AAA titles.
Why does Nintendo deserve these patents when they aren’t going to produce anything meaningful with them and simply weaponize them to squash any real threatening competition?
Pokémon is the highest grossing franchise in the world, and 2nd place isn’t even close. I think they can give a little ground to an indie developer who makes games that people are actually interested in playing. The patent bullshit is ridiculous.
Because that’s how Nintendo works. They are the Disney of gaming.
hardly call pokemon an AAA title. maybe a solid A+ even before thier enshittification during the SWSH era.
That’s lame af. Flying on my dragon dude between my bases was badass.
You can still fly, it’s just gliding that got hit by the gaming mafia
Remember they amended the patent after palworld came out
This is bullshit. Warner Brothers and Nintendo need to lose, hard.
Also, why the hell does Nintendo think they were first when it comes to the concept? Animals and gliding have been a thing for a long time.
You see, the patent system is based on a “first to file the paperwork” basis, thereby enabling literal legalized theft. Neoliberalism at work, precisely as designed.
then blame the patent office, because it shouldn’t be so
I definitely blame the patent office.
But also, patents should not exist. They need to be completely abolished. Copyrights are one thing, copyrights make sense, patents are another entirely, existing solely to facilitate intellectual theft from both individual entities and the broader public.
Fuck Nintendo.
I wonder how hard it would be for an “unofficial” patch to “somehow” be released that restores the previous functionality
Here’s hoping Pokemon and Nintendo see disappointing sales. Everytime someone brings up Pokemon, bring up Palworld and how massive of a dick the Pokemon Company/Nintendo was. When people talk about the Switch 2, they bring up all the lawsuits Nintendo brought up on fans, all the YouTubers that dealt with issues because suing people, I’d assume, is Nintendo’s main income source at this point…
Worthy cause but a slim hope. Everyone who’s been planning to continue supporting Nintendo, and who I have talked about these issues with, most of them echo the sentiments and agree that Nintendo is bad, but go on to say ‘…but in the end, my favorite franchises are exclusive to Nintendo so…’. I fear nothing can make a dent in the nostalgia abuser that is Nintendo, not like this.
i doubt it, 10s millions still are pokemon fans, majority are children + they also have the TRADING card game which i heard they are making bank on that too, and then the extra side games like GO, and pocket, only boosts pokemons popularity.
they dint fall in sales when they enshittified sword and shield and beyond. they rightfully sued some research instituition, because naming some of thier stuff after oncogene is bad press.
I’ve had a second wind of pokemon since pogo came out, but they killed it with the sale to the Saudis. I’m not supporting Saudi blood ventures
This is why I’ll never feel sorry for Nintendo - karma is long overdue for this company. In fact, I’ll download a switch emulator right now just to spite them.
Nice, please share the link with everyone for ultimate spite (and cos I deleted yuzu once by mistake)
/s
Hum.
points at sidebar
I was joking, I promise, look I added a /s 😇
Yeah, right… /s
😂
I have a private git copy of every recent open-source Switch emulator. I don’t have a use for them, for now at least, but at least their work won’t be lost.
Carry on, Flamekeeper!
Heck yeah.
Torzu seems to be the logical successor to Yuzu.
I started using it last week. It works well so far although I have only played the new donkey Kong. Take note that Torzu has gone to the dark web, so if you want it you need to go through TOR. This is good because this makes take down near impossible.
I’m still using the latest version of Yuzu (the version shortly before the takedown). How does Torzu compare to that? And is it possible to add Torzu to Emudeck?
Torzu is a fork of Yuzu, so essentially the same thing, just being kept updated. I am not familiar with emudeck but I am sure it will be compatible. I know files like saves etc from Yuzu work with Torzu.
I need to start patenting random game mechanics, apparently.
Might be cool to have AI come up with a bunch of mechanics to patent.
Copyright and patent laws need to die.
Victims of Stockholm Syndrome always focus on what their abusers provide, but never what they take away.
This is such an extremely naive thing to say.
Do you enjoy having every good, innovative US or EU product die immediately due to China/India making a 1:1 copy and flooding the markets with it?
Enjoy innovative products that startups create? How about not having any of that because as soon as a startup makes something, a big corp comes in with their money, steals the idea, and floods the market?
EDIT: no arguments, just downvotes? Damn, I thought this place was supposed to be better than Reddit…
Chinese companies famously ignore patent law and do make copies and try to flood the western market with them.
Most startups don’t have the time and/or money to patent their ideas and big corps do squash them/steal their ideas routinely once they become noticeable.
If anything, startups can’t develop their ideas because some company will hold a generic patent like “clicking a button does something” (or “glide with a pet”) from 30 years ago.
But western companies at least have a tool to fight back or limit the flood.
Ah, the usual “if the solution is not absolutely 100% perfect, let’s throw out the solution”. Come on…
Yeah, this happens all of once every billion times. Clearly the system is stupid and needs to be killed so that nobody who isn’t extremely rich can actually develop anything new without being immediately put out to pasture.
I just wanna know which amazing video game innovations We are protecting here in America. Are we talking about the failing franchises that have been milking their customers for 15 years? Have we done anything really innovative recently? Remakes delayed games and flops.
The Nemesis system, which we just sit on and don’t do anything with.
First, I’m not talking specifically about America. Second, I’m not talking about “amazing innovations”. Copyright is also for trademarks, very characteristic gameplay mechanics, etc. For example, Playrix made “Fishdom” which was copy-paste Worms. Team17 won the case and protected their IP.
Umm… No? What does that have to do with copyright or IP protection…?
Have you tried looking at titles from other publishers than Ubisoft, EA or Activition?
Eh it’s all just stolen and borrowed code. Whens the next Dawn of war or command and conquer coming out? Oh never. locked behind IP laws and timid corpos.
Got proof? Go and win the easiest lawsuit of your life.
Yes, US companies have a lot of IP conflicts with China and we do tend to hear about them through media. But that paints a skewed picture of what’s actually happening.
If you were to research it more carefully, you would find out that the vast majority of these claims (>90%) are not pursued by US companies. As a deliberate, strategic decision. They don’t want to.
Ask yourself why.
Don’t believe me? Google is your friend.
I don’t care where the company making the claim is from, as long as it acquired the IP legally and has a valid claim for protecting it.
The way the patent system works is bad in many, many, MANY ways, but saying “copyright and patent laws need to die” is just idiotic. As it is, we at least have a semblance of rules. Without it, it’s just “whoever can reproduce and mass produce a promising product faster”. And that means: China because they already make everything.
Do we enjoy the premise of capitalism where businesses compete to make the best and cheapest product for the consumer?
Yes. Yes we did up until a few months ago.
A few months ago?! lol sure ok.
We are getting cheap but we are not getting anywhere close to best and it’s been that way for at least a decade.
WTF are you talking about??
I’m talking about 70$ games man. Im talking about IP being locked away for decades. Genres of games dying off to push profitability of bigger projects. Strangling out smaller studios any way possible. I’m talking about Gamers. They came for GAMERS.
You’re talking nonsense, is what you’re talking about.
What does a genre drying up have to do with IP or copyright? Like, are you even reading your own words?
Supergiant Games, CDPR, Larian, Sandfall Interactive and every single indie creator out there clearly haven’t been informed of how horrible their situation is. Maybe you should contact them and let them know that the 10/10 games they’ve been making are impossible to make due to copyright and IP protection laws?
Also was loosly talking about my increased business costs associated with china tariffs. Let the chinese steal shit and make it cheap for me thats what im talking abou.
Then go back to reddit? You are daft as fuck defending this crap. Nintendo patenting game mechanics shouldn’t be a thing.
Fuck Nintendo and its supporters.
How about you come back to me when you can read?
I’m not defending Nintendo, I’m saying that “copyright and patent laws need to die” stance is naive.
You clearly can’t read. Enjoy those downvotes for being a moron.
You would be correct if that is how the copyright and trademark system actually worked.
But they don’t. They favour the big guy, not the little guy. Crazy, I know. Wait until you find out how modern taxation systems work.
That’s the US law system, not the IP system in general.
There are examples of smaller companies managing to protect their IP (Finjan vs Symantec, Unwired Planet vs. Huawei, Neo Wireless vs. Sony, etc., etc - that’s just from a quick search).
I’m not saying that the copyright system in place is perfect, but saying “copyright and patent laws need to die” is just delusional.
Patents have an expiry for a reason and the expiry date is pretty generous IMO. It’s thought as “Startup x can invent and make money off it but after it the market should take over so further improvements can be made.” Imagine if they patented CRISPR Cas9 or the first DNA sequencing method. It would limit science for the entire time of the expiry but not after.
Claiming invention patent for the pokeballs more than 20 years after the game came out is absurd. They can keep the brand, trademark and IP for their weirdly long time but innovations should become public so the market can continue innovating.
I don’t think patents and copyright “need to die”, but they are currently both overly broad and last far too long. Copyright protection especially has no justifiable reason to be even 1/4 as long as it is.
If it’s a perfect 1:1 copy why does it matter? Can you explain how this isn’t just a stance rooted in xenophobia?
You just described the dream of most startups. The goal of the vast majority is to be acquired by a big corp so that their idea/product can continue growing, because without acquisition growth is severely limited.
First of all: very often it’s literally a 1:1 copy.
Secondly: imagine you make an innovative product. I don’t know, automatic fence painter, whatever. It sells well, but you don’t have the money to start a large-scale production, you’re doing OK with sales and are looking for investors, but things are fairly slow. In comes a Chinese dude, buys one auto-painter from you, brings it home, dismantles the thing, copies everything (potentially making some changes), and starts a massive-scale production in his factory. Due to the mass-production, worse materials, and lower labour costs, he sells the product at 20% the price of yours. The market is saturated with his knock-off, you’re left with zero money.
Is this xenophobia to you? Or someone stealing your product and killing your business?
Yeah, I’m not talking about them being acquired. What gave you that idea? I specifically used the words “steals their idea”.
Do you know why there doesn’t exist automated fencepost painters? As bad as this sort of stuff is in software world it’s soooo much worse in hardware world. The licensing fees for every single little piece of IP that go into it would nickel and dime even large businesses out of building anything like that. Sure there’s also technical difficulties with building one, but those are surmountable. However, a business model that could survive the constant threats of litigation, licensing fees and turn even a mild profit does not exist.
Yes, because you just described what businesses throughout the Western world do to your mythical small business and projected it onto some mythical far east.
You do realize that is the point of IP right? To allow legalized theft in this exact manner? In the exact article this comment chain is discussing palworld did their due diligence to verify they weren’t violating any of Nintendo’s IP and then Nintendo modified their patent filing so that they were with the express goal of stealing their product.
I’m just impressed that you managed to miss the point by so much.
Correct. Which is precisely why copyright law was established in the first place and why companies like Facebook, Google or Amazon were able to become what they were without Microsoft or Apple just copy-pasting what they did.
The copyright laws are not perfect, far from it. But they give smaller companies SOME form of defence against the corps.
Do you also believe that OSHA was created to control the poor employee into submission by their great corporate overlord?
Yes, like I said: the copyright laws are not perfect. But saying that it would better WITHOUT ANY COPYRIGHT LAWS is insanity.
Microsoft did copy and paste though: Yammer, Bing and Azure respectively. Apple tried with Ping/eWorld, Safari/Spotlight but didn’t really get into the web host space. Also worth mentioning the duopoly nature of those 2 specifically.
Rather telling that all your examples are Fortune 500 companies?
That’s a rather impressive hay golem you’ve built there.
We’re not talking copyright laws, we’re talking patent laws and you have yet to explain why it would be insane without changing scope or inventing fanciful scenarios.
So, you fully and honestly believe that Microsoft has stolen Google’s and Amazon’s code? As in: you’re 100% certain that’s the case here?
No. It’s not worth mentioning in a topic that has nothing to do with that fact…
It amazes me how you see a company NOW being a Fortune 500, and going “waagh, IP protection only serves the massive corpos!!!” without realising how many of those companies became Fortune 500 thanks to those protections.
It equally amazes me how you see the law being used by said companies most of the time (because, you know, they’re larger) and go “we can do without these laws” without blinking an eye, or a single neuron firing towards the thought that… these laws ALSO serve the smaller companies.
Mate, are you lost or something?
This is what my reply was to:
Do I need to put “copyright” in bold here?
Does a patent protect the concept or the specific code? You seemed pretty adamant that reverse engineering was theft previously, and assuming you haven’t changed your definition of theft then yes, according to your definition of theft I’m 100% certain that’s the case.
Thanks to those, or in spite of? You are focusing on outliers and expecting that to be a convincing argument to describe the typical.
Just because they can, doesn’t mean it’s something to expect. There are orders of magnitude between how often they protect, and how often the destroy. You a big lottery fan or something?
Fair, I was attempting to limit scope with only discussing patents and not getting into the rest of the weeds and didn’t properly communicate that. I had assumed there would be more than a single neuron between the two of us, but that was clearly presumptive of me.
Depends on the patent.
It’s not “my definition of theft”, it’s “theft”. If you’re 100% certain, hit Amazon lawyers up, I’m sure they’ll love to talk to you about it - it’s literally free money for them and maybe a big payout for you, right?
The hilarious thing is that you’re like so many other “revolutionaries” who come in and go: “oh no, the X rules are stifling the market/competition/free exchange of information/whatever” while being completely ignorant on how these rules came to be.
It’s like these capitalists of today saying that OSHA needs to go because they’re losing profits to it, completely oblivious to the fact that it was the capitalists of the XIX century who created them to increase profits (because having to replace skilled labourers became a high cost factor).
You strike me as someone who thinks that copyright and other IP protection laws are something that was set up in XX (maybe XIX) century as a means to protect the wealthy. Am I wrong?
Right. So when I refused to change the scope, you decided to call me an idiot. How very gentlemanly of you.
Not how that works, stop talking out of your ass (Gottschalk v. Benson)
You keep switching between moral and legal arguments. They are not the same.
Deflection
Strawman
Literally mirroring your words back at you
It’s exactly how it works. You can patent the code, the solution, the material, whatever the fuck you want. That’s what a patent IS.
Oh, do elaborate!
Example of a similar thought-process.
Huh? That wasn’t an argument, mate, that was an assumption and a question. Are you OK?
I still kinda’ hope I’d get an answer, though.
Well, not “literally” and not quite “mirroring”. I think you need some rest, mate, you seem tired and unfocused.
palword wouldve solved some of its problem by not naming it to close to POKEMON names, or gimmicks, or copy verbatim some of its features. they only noticed when things were named exactly like they did in the pokemon consoles.
kinda wierd thing to target, when flying was in WOW for 2 decades before this lawsuit.
-after looking at another post, they also copied the pokemon and changed it very little of the pal-creature, palword needs ot do better to have a stronger case.
I think there is potential that this was intended.
PalWorld was SO on the nose modeled after pokemon plus Breath of the Wild that it couldn’t be anything but a stab at Nintendo. And yet, it seems that (I’m not a lawyer) they skirted around ever actually infringing on copyrights. If you want to build a zoo full of creatures, there are only so many ways you can combine things without making a fire dog or ice dragon, and then comparisons can be made. PalWorld has many creatures that I don’t recognize as being similar to existing pokemon. Given that Nintendo has not gone after PalWorld for copyright infringement, I’d say that means they don’t have a case.
Patents are another angle, and I’m far from a patent lawyer. Have you ever read one? They are full of jargon and what seem to be nonsense words, especially a software patent for a video game. I found an article that describes how Nintendo can use a ‘new’ patent to attack PalWorld, but near the end he clearly calls out that there is a difference between ‘legal’ and ‘legitimate.’ I can’t seem to find the actual ‘throwing a ball to make a thing happen’ new patent, but I’d assume PalWorld doesn’t infringe the original patent, or Nintendo would have just used that one. The article author also notes how Nintendo applied for a divisional patent near the end of a window for doing so, which presumably extends the total lifetime of the patent protection. A new divisional patent last year probably means we have 40 years of no ‘ball-throwing mechanics.’
I hope that this whole thing is a stunt. PalWorld was commercially successful, and even if they lose and have to modify the game, it will remain successful. I think that there’s a possibility that the developer and publisher are fighting against software patents kind of in general and used PalWorld as bait that Nintendo fell for.
If they lose, then there will be a swath of gamers who are at least mildly outraged at software patents. Popular opinion can (occasionally) sway policy.
If they win, then we have another chink in the armor of software patents as a whole. See Google vs Oracle regarding the ability to patent an API.
If we can manage to kill software patents for gameplay mechanics, like throwing balls at things, being able to take off and land seamlessly, or having a recurring enemy taunt you, then we get better games that remix things that worked.
Imagine how terribly different games would be if someone had patented “A action where a user presses a button to swing their weapon, and if that weapon hits an enemy, that enemy takes damage.”
I’m sure nintendo will have a patent for using a command for a menu to use an effect that buffs, heals, or harms. That way they can prove they are the ones who invented JRPGs too.
Adds to the ever growing list of copy-blight examples
I can get the pokéball, but mounts in games are older than pokémon. That one makes no sense.
Both older and newer, yet they didn’t go after the countless games that have mounts.
and pokemon dint even had actual mounts til much later than most consoles.
This is insane - Pokemon cannot trademark having mounts in games. Screw Niantic, the Pokemon company and especially Nintendo which basically controls the first two. Screw them
Do not support these companies.
Sincerely, A life long Pokemon fan
Atlus should sue Nintendo for stealing the idea of monster collecting and storing them in your PC from Megami Tensei.
Yep down with these mfers
pokemon licenses to niantac, its solely on pokemon company/nintendo.
Why is there nothing in place to punish Ninendo for doing shit like this?
Patent law is rigged. Legal monopolies shouldn’t exist.
I agree IP law is messed up, but that doesn’t mean the idea doesn’t have merit.
Having a temporary, legal monopoly on something that requires a lot of R&D and not much production cost (say, a novel or new kind of asphalt) allows the creator to make back their R&D costs before competitors come out with cheaper alternatives. Without that protection, companies would be less likely to invest in R&D.
We need shorter durations and more scrutiny on scope. Also, patents should generally not apply to software.
As an incentive structure for corporations and “people” purely motivated by avarice, sure.
Most people naturally want to create and contribute as long as their needs and most basic wants are met. A monopoly as an incentive is not necessary.
There are many ways to motivate corporations to do R&D outside of offering them a monopoly on a silver platter. Incentives are only one half of the equation. Its really all about leverage.
The main alternative is offering them a subsidy on a silver platter, but then you’re making everyone pay for that R&D, not just the customers who want whatever that product is, and there’s no protection against IP theft unless the government owns and enforces the patents or something abroad.
I personally prefer the IP law approach, but I think it needs significant reforms, both in duration and the approval process.
With a monopoly, you may very well be making everyone pay for the increased price gouge that comes with monopolies. Not just the customer of that particular product. It depends on the nature of the product.
If it is a component of a more common device or product, basically everyone ends up paying more (HDMI comes to mind). If its an innovation relating to a basic need and gets integrated with the majority of services, basically everyone ends up paying more. If its something that has external implications on the market or wider world that creates inefficiencies, then people functionally make less money because effect people pay more and thus long term this harms spending on a variety of products. If people can’t afford the price gouge and continue using less effective products (assuming they are even available) they likely long term spend more money to make up for the inefficiencies from that.
Monopolies damage things beyond the product that gets monopolized and merely concentrates wealth.
Regardless a subsidy is not the only alternative. That’s still thinking in terms of carrot, and you are forgetting the stick. You can also legislate mandatory R&D in budgets for large corporations based on revenue/profits just as much as you with the punishment of potentially being fined/taxed more.
But outside of that, there is also government contracts. That is, a single payer, (monopsony) generally can get fantastic results out of competing firms. Its largely a major reason why the American Military has historically benefited from such significant technological advancements for nearly a century now.
Not all monopolies are created equal. We’re talking about IP protections, not general monopolies, meaning these are new products, not some existing necessity. IP law on its own can’t kill existing products.
An author having exclusive rights to a work doesn’t prevent other authors from making their own works. A pharmaceutical company having exclusive rights to a medication doesn’t prevent other pharmaceutical companies from making competing medications. Likewise for video games and whatnot.
The problems with Palworld have little to do with IP law as a concept but with how broad the protection of patents is. IMO, video game mechanics shouldn’t be patentable, and companies should be limited to copyright protections for their IP. But IP protection is still important as a concept so creators don’t get screwed and customers don’t get defrauded.
Yeah, that’s not going to be abused/scare away companies.
It’s also why the US pays an obscene amount for its military. Defense contractors absolutely fleece the government because they are generally not allowed to contract with other governments, so they expect a higher profit from their one contracted buyer.
Only have access to this account during work, so late reply.
It doesn’t matter, monopolization at any level has the effect I described.
You’d need to elaborate I’m not clear what you mean by this.
There are ways to force this into not being an issue. We don’t have to suck a corporation’s dick to keep their productivity.
It sounds like the military is still getting what they paid for and its worked out for them. They pay obscene amounts to get obscene results.
Single payer also applies to healthcare proposals and is generally seen as a fantastic solution to keeping healthcare prices down.
A few ways:
Not a word I like to hear when it comes to government. The more power you give it, the more likely some idiot will come along and abuse it. Look at Trump, the only reason he can absolutely wreck the economy w/ tariffs is because Congress gave him that power and refuses to curtail it.
Sure, but they’re getting a lot less of it than they could if it was a more competitive market.
They pay obscene amounts to get decent results. I think they could get the same (or better!) results with a lot less spending if the system wasn’t rigged to be anti-competitive.
I think that only works in countries w/o a large medical devices/pharmaceutical industry, otherwise you end up with ton of lobbying and whatnot. I don’t think the total cost of healthcare would go down, it would just shift to net tax payers and healthy people. Look at the ACA, it didn’t reduce healthcare spending at all, it just shifted who pays for it, and it seems healthy people ended up spending more (to subsidize less healthy people).
To actually reduce costs, you need to make pricing as transparent as possible, and I don’t think single payer achieves that. It can be a good option in certain countries, but I don’t think it’s universally a good option.
So you’d rather give power to corporations. Who definitely abuse their power. Rather than a government, which at least is potentially elected.
I think governmental structures are probably outside the scope of this conversation, but I’ll at least state that the reason Trump is bad is not only that he has power. Its the lack of power that his opposition has because they utterly fail to seize it when opportunity presents itself. Again, it is all about leverage.
I think that this is pure conjecture. Going “full competitive” would be at best a double edged sword. A lot of money and risk is involved in highly advanced military tech. Realistically you’d see businesses crumble and merge. Naturally converging into a monopoly.
To actually reduce costs, you increase the leverage the buyer has. Transparency in pricing would do that to a tiny degree, what would do so far better is a monopsony/single-payer system where all the buyers effectively are unionized.
Again, it always boils down to leverage.
If the market is sufficiently competitive, yes, I trust corporations more than governments. I firmly believe giving more power to governments results in more monopolies, generally speaking, because it creates an opportunity for the larger players to lobby for ways to create barriers to competition.
That’s a pretty broad statement though, and there are certainly cases where I would prefer the government to step in.
I don’t think that’s true. I think you’re making an assumption that the payer has an incentive to reduce costs, but I really don’t think that’s the case. What they do have is a lot of power over pricing, and while that could be used to force producers to reduce costs, it can also be used to shift costs onto taxpayers in exchange for favors from the companies providing the services.
That’s quite similar to the current military industrial complex, the military is the only purchaser of these goods, so the suppliers can largely set their prices. A monopsony means the value of making a deal is massive for a company because they get access to a massive market, which also means the value of lobbying to get that deal is also high.
So I really don’t trust that a single payer system would actually work in the US to reduce total healthcare costs, it’ll just hide it. If we want to actually cut healthcare costs, we need to fix a number of things, such as:
The problems are vast and I think single payer would likely just sweep them under the rug. We either need socialized healthcare or maximum transparency, single payer would just be a disappointment.
Competition naturally degrades over time as companies go out of business and consolidate. And capital interests fight tooth and nail against large monopolies being split back up. Its more or less a miracle that it’s ever happened at all and it would be naive to think it’ll ever happen again.
Do you think a more direct “medical patient union” would work? Skipping a government intermediary?
I mean, I’d prefer socialized healthcare over single payer. Single payer for me is merely an acceptable middle ground. As would having a proper public option next to private care (though admittedly that would slowly erode from lobbying).
And it naturally improves over time as companies challenge established players and “distupt” the market. As long as the barrier to entry remains sufficiently low, there’s no reason for a net degradation in competition.
Large companies tend to become less efficient. Yes, they have economies of scale, but they tend to scare away innovators, so they switch to lobbying to maintain their edge.
The correct approach IMO is to counter the lobbying efforts of large orgs, and that means stripping governments of a lot of their power. Regulations tend to result in more monopolies, requiring antitrust to fix, and as you noted, that’s extremely rare.
Yeah, that can work. I’m thinking of having your primary care orovider offer your “insurance” policy, and they’d be on the hook to fund any procedures you need. So they have an incentive to keep you healthy, and that agreement could be a legal obligation that the doctor is doing their best to keep you healthy.
I do think we should socialize emergency services though. If a paramedic determines you need an ambulance ride, that should be free.
I prefer privatized care with transparency in pricing across the board, shortened patent durations, and some government assistance for the poor. But failing that, socialized care is probably the next best. Anything in the middle just breeds corruption.
R&D for many companies is taking the research done by underpaid graduate and PhD students and using that to create some sort of product or buying out the startups those students created and building from that.
We already live in a system where the majority of costs are publicly subsidized (and that’s not mentioning the myriad of direct subsidies these companies receive, for an especially egregious example look at the amount Pfizer got paid to develop the Covid vaccine) and then the result is patented and privatized.
They usually get grants, and frequently the student will get hired to follow up on that research. A lot of the research ends up unusable to the company as well, at least on its own.
I think that’s a bit extreme, but I’ll give you that a lot of R&D is subsidized. The COVID example, however, is an outlier, since the funding was to accelerate ending the pandemic, which was critical for the economy as a whole.
You’re right that that’s an aspect I forgot about, however If the patent system worked as you envision it then those students would own the parent which they would then lease to those companies. The actual situation is quite legally messy because it’s usually the universities which own the IP produced, (which is then leased out via partnerships, grants etc ) and when those individuals lease themselves with the promise of producing more valuable IP they have to take cautions to not infringe on their previous work.
Not really, using Covid as an example this paper details the pre and post-epidemic funding sources that went into the discovery, testing and production of the COVID vaccine. Do you have any other examples you’d like to use to demonstrate how it’s “extreme”?
Yes and no, but it is well publicized and documented which is what I was trying to communicate with that specific one as an example.
Which is totally reasonable. The student applies for a graduate program to get a degree, not get rich off a patent. Theoretically, any patent royalties retained by the university would go toward funding university activities. I don’t know how much this happens in practice though.
That said, there should be limits here. If a patent makes over a certain amount, the rest should go to the student.
Right, because it’s an outlier.
If you go to the patent office and look at recent patents, I doubt a significant number are the result of government funding. Most patents are mundane and created as part of private work to prevent competitors from profiting from their work. My company holds a ton of patents, and I highly doubt the government has any involvement in funding them.
Did Nintendo get government funding for its patents? I doubt it.
And what’s the big selling point behind why you would want to get a degree?
Pre-pandemic public funding wasn’t, which is why I linked a source that provided both so you could see how much of an outlier it was/wasn’t.
They all will be to some extent. The hard part is quantifying the extent for each individual patent. I can guarantee that you’re company received/has received some sort of public funding and so yes the government does have involvement directly funding them, even if it isn’t as explicit as with public health funding. Indirect funding is the much harder one to suss out but is likely significantly more.
Directly? Probably not, but the whole point of bringing up universities was to show one of the indirect paths. However I don’t speak Japanese in order to actually research but would be very curious to know what sort of subsidies/public assistance it receives, if there exists a thing similar to MEDIA/Creative Europe, etc.
To work on interesting problems, that’s why most people get advanced degrees, no? I highly doubt most people who get a Ph.D are in it for the money…
It’s also rarely directly related to R&D. For example, the company I work for produces chemical products, and innovations in that formulation is critical to our competitive advantage, but not particularly interesting from a national perspective. Our innovations merely help our products stand out from competitors, but competitor products are pretty similar.
If we get subsidies (haven’t checked), it would be for producing these chemicals with less pollution, using locally produced ingredients, or to improve safety of transporting them.
If you try hard enough, yeah, you could probably find some form of government funding. But that doesn’t mean the patents were produced as a direct result of public funding.
If that’s people’s main motivator then why does copyright exist in the first place?
If you’re a large enough institution to have as many patents as you claim to then I guarantee you do. I would encourage you to dig into that as well as the why.
How many transition steps are needed for a precursor chemical to no longer be a required precursor for a product? Is a byproduct that is sold not a product because it’s not the primary intended production output?
Copyright exists to create a temporary monopoly so the creator can recoup their creation costs and some profit on top, since creating a work takes a lot more resources than duplicating it. Likewise for patents, though that’s more focused on sharing ideas.
We probably are. A quick search shows 100-200 patents, many of which have long since expired. Most of them are incredibly mundane, and I highly doubt a government would’ve been involved in funding it, and I don’t really know how to find out if they were.
That depends on a variety of things, but in general, very few? Like 2-3?
Let’s say my company gets funding to disseminate OSHA information to employees so they know their rights and what the company is obligated to provide. That has absolutely nothing to do w/ funding the actual production process at plants, even if those plants are subjected to OSHA safety requirements. In fact, it likely runs counter to increasing production because employees in a seminar by definition aren’t producing product at the plant.
So yeah, I would say government funding has to be pretty directly related to R&D to count as “funding” R&D. Maybe there’s an award for the first group to come up with something or a general subsidy to fund research in a given area.
Creation costs like the cost of an advanced degree? You’re repeating talking points like nobody’s heard them before and contradicting yourself every other comment.
That was a rhetorical question, let me try rephrasing that. If A+B+C=D and D+E=F is A a requirement to get F? Or is it no longer relevant because it’s 2 steps removed?
I wish I got paid to avoid fines. I understand that is how your deeply corrupt system works but you really can’t understand the financial incentives there can you? Imagine that illegal parking is a huge problem so instead of parking tickets they pay everyone who owns a car to sit through a parking information seminar. Do you honestly think that isn’t going to factor into your decision on whether you should own/drive a car? Is it unreasonable to say that the state is paying you to drive?
No, copyright has little to do with advanced degrees. The creation costs are the time and resources needed to produce the book, movie, software project, or other work, which can be substantial.
There’s a better argument for patents, but still weak.
Right, and rhetorical questions by definition don’t have good answers. There needs to be a reasonable limit here, and what’s reasonable depends on what specifically we’re talking about.
For example, I benefitted a lot from my public education, but I can’t really quantify the impact to a a dollar amount, so I don’t think it’s reasonable to say my career success is due to public funding.
For me to accept that an innovation came from the public sector, I’d need to see a direct link between public funding and the innovation. Just saying a company got a tax incentive to put an office somewhere doesn’t mean all innovations from that office is government funded.
Yes, that’s unreasonable.
Driving is heavily subsidized by the state. For example, a lot of the funding for roads comes from income taxes instead of direct use taxes like registration and gas taxes. Even so, I don’t consider that to be paying me to drive, but it is an incentive to drive.
The government does pay me to have babies since I get a tax credit if I have kids. The difference is I have to do something proactive to get the benefit, whereas the roads will be funded whether I drive or not.
If a company gets a tax incentive to put an office somewhere, that doesn’t mean all inventions made there are publicly funded unless that’s specifically called out in the incentive deal.
You seem to be replying to someone else entirely.
In what way?
In every way
Okay.
Not that I matter being a single person but cya Nintendo I won’t be buying anything from you ever again honestly unless its used and from someone on facebook marketplace or the likes of.
So are they next going after unicorns that you capture?
What about the birds in quackshot? That game is from the 90s.