Nintendo and The Pokémon Company seek injunction against Palworld plus fine and damages, developer says
Nintendo and The Pokémon Company seek injunction against Palworld plus fine and damages, developer says
For reference, the allegedly infringing patents are these:
Holy hell.
Even by the standard of "all software patents are nonsense", these are a fucking joke.
It basically hits any game with mounts or vehicles.
Hold my bacon, one can patent the idea that a game character switches mounts depending on a given state? (Image 3)
Seems like it. So when you come down from the sky on your flying mount and get close to the ground, you swap to a horse mount for example.
How can one patent this.. wtf!
Software patents are fucked, ain't they? You can implement a thing using completely different code, algorithms, hell even programming languages/CPU architectures, and you'd still be infringing. There was some stupid fight over a simple slider UI element to unlock a phone a few years back.
The solutions here don't seem to really be solutions in my opinion, especially the third one. It's like if the problem a patent solves was "being able to individually package sandwiches on a conveyor belt" and the solution was "have a machine that recognizes where one sandwich ends and another begins so it can stop and start packaging appropriately." Like, no kidding, but how?
So the first two seem to deal with throwing a capture item at a creature (wild pokemon) and/or releasing a character's own creature to fight it (essentially first seen in Legends Arceus, tossing a ball at a pokemon to aggro it and then fighting it with your pokemon). The third one is, as others have said, Mount transitions (at least in pokemon, also first seen in Legends Arceus if you only count ride pokemon; if vehicles are included I believe the first would be Sword/Shield). Though if vehicles are included Nintendo would have a hard time fighting that one. Vehicle transformation, especially in racing games, has been around forever.
Why are there dates in the corners?
These are the patent publication dates, for more details you can check https://patentscope.wipo.int/ with patents 7545191, 7493117 and 7528390
If these were stories I was picking up to implement I would be asking the BA to elaborate some more 😂
Looking through the first one's content and it seems reasonable? The patent's abstract is supposed to be as widely applicable as legally permitted, so it's like a completely different language on top of legalese.
Nintendo are the baddies
Yet people keep buying from them
Can't wait for gamers to completely ignore this and buy their next console and pokémon game
I've stopped giving Nintendo money for anything, it's been about 5 years now.
Nah fuck them. Got a switch + games. Account hacked. Wrote to tech sup. Nothing but automated answer. Gave that shit away never again
Still it would be best for Ninny to lose this one hard.
First: if they won't there will be more to come for other games, stopping any innovation in this genre.
Second: Their lawsuits are hitting other software developers (see Yuzu/Ryujinx cases), players and content creators and we need some case where they lose so they don't go even wilder
Nintendo sues everyone they can because as an IP holder of some seriously valuable properties, everything else in the gaming industry just looks like free real estate for them to colonize. I can make a game called "Dog Fighters" and I'm sure they'll find a way to tell me they own that idea.
I curse patents
Oh I haven't played that in a while. Looks like a bunch of updates
I'm kinda sure Palworld's devs are ok with this. Makes them not having to finish the early access game, which their studio has like 4 others to finish anyway.
Software parents are such absolute horseshit.
I mean if they help children grow when they have no real parents...