- cross-posted to:
- gaming@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@beehaw.org
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.
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Fuck Nintendo.
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.
Remember they amended the patent after palworld came out
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 are 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.
I don’t care about Palworld, but I do hate Nintendo. Enemy of my enemy and all that.
Nintendo are rightly losing their free pass with gamers.
That is very true, but the Venn Diagram overlap between GamersTM and ‘Nintendo gamers’ is a rapidly shrinking area.
That’s lame af. Flying on my dragon dude between my bases was badass.
So can we please fork v0.5.4?
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”?
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”?
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.
point does this game become “not the game I bought”?
Anytime you can’t access the version of a game you spent money on
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.
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
.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.
clearly PalWorld takes more than a little “inspiration” on a bunch of different Pokemon IP
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’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.
Look, if the problem is the similar designs then sue for that!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I think Cassette Beasts pulled off the Pokemon gameplay format without making anything that Nintendo could try and sue over.
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.
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.
I think that’s a pretty generous interpretation.
It’s like you are trying to pretend that character does not look like a Pokemon because their appearance WAS technically different… even though it uses identical parts from several actual characters from the IP.
So it should be counted as non-infringing because they simply re-arranged / mixed and matched those character parts like they were a Mr. Potato-head-esque / ransom note magazine assembly / amalgamation of interchangeable similar puzzle pieces?
And I just grabbed one of the first results from when you search Pokemon Palworld similarities… I’m not familiar enough with every single one to find a more egregious example, but again - let’s be honest. This is the IP equivalent of saying “I’m not touching you” while a sibling holds their finger right next to your eye as if to poke it.
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.
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.
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.
Let me be clear :
Copyright law as it stands right now is stupid, and should only benefit individuals from large companies looking to use their resources to steal from them without compensation.
I’m just talking about not letting junk companies pretend they made a game for your favorite IP in a way that lets them trick less-informed people.
It seems most of the actual copyright law benefits big companies as it is interpreted now… which is kind of the opposite of how it originally was intended.
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.
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.
They did that on Craftopia, too, only it was to catch animals rather than monsters.
There is also a nefarious organization competing with you for capturing these wild creatures like Team Rocket.
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.
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.
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.
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
Not how patents work but whatever, Nintendo has more money so they’re in the right
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.
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.
