Nobody saw this coming, right? Actually that’s only partially in jest– I genuinely expected the lawsuit to be for copyright infringement based on the “Pal’s” similarity to their Pokemon counterparts. Instead it’s patent infringement, which sounds to me like they gave up on the copyright approach and just tried to find something to sue for. Palworld’s explosion into the cultural zeitgeist earlier this year probably bruised Pokemon’s ego a bit, and you know how much Nintendo loves to put their lawyers to work.
On a related topic of things we saw coming (in this case because I told you it was coming)… we’re getting ready to launch the Kickstarter for the next Ctrl+Alt+Del books! This time I’ve managed to activate the “coming soon” page without accidentally launching the project weeks early. That’s a win for my anxiety levels.
If you head to the link, you can sign up to be notified when the project goes live (which should be early October, concrete date to be settled upon soon). The books are kind of a big deal for what we do here, not just because I like to collect my work into a power-outage-proof, end-of-civilization-proof format, but also in terms of their ties to the sustainability of the website and the work I do here. Apart from our Patreon, books are the other big way you can support the comic, and help me continue operating this weird business model where I first give you my work for free, and then years later ask you to buy it. So I’m really hoping you’ll come check out the project once it launches.
Its more surprising they are going for those particular patents, given the fact they have patently ignored every creature collection game that has released in the last 3 decades. They didn’t patent strike Blizzard for adding pet battles to WoW, they didn’t go after Square Enix for making a Dragon Quest monster game, or Bandi Namco for Digimon. In the Indie game sphere Tem Tem, Cassette Beasts in the last few years or the dozen’s of indies on Steam, or the countless mobile gatcha games. You seen the ads where the cute L1 dragon evolves into a scantily clad sexy… Read more »
Not to mention that a lot of those patents are so broad that they may lose those patents if the defense can prove that someone else made it first, and that some patent laws only allow them to hold it for 20 years. Those laws last for a lot less time than copyright.
Don’t worry, they got their bases covered on that – they were only granted the patent in question earlier this year.
They were granted a revision to the existing patent, not sure if that resets the expiry date though.
yeah, except those werent blatantly ripping off pokemon. palworld is.
They can’t go after DQ Monsters… given how Pokémon ripped the concept off from Dragon Quest 5 (which is 4 years older than Pokémon). Many Gen 1 Pokémon also ripped their designs off of DQ.
They’d be fools to go after Dragon Quest considering Pokemon was a rip off of the monster recruiting in Dragon Quest V.
If it’s the patents I’ve read, then it’s about capturing monsters in a 3D open world environment without switching to a battle screen that Nintendo patented with Pokémon Legends: Arceus.
Most games you’ve listed are older than PLA and none of these allow to directly capture monsters in the open world environment – maybe Dragon Quest Monsters, haven’t played these games.
That sounds…incredibly broad. Like unenforcibly so. Imagine patenting card games where your winning hand is the match that is most statistically likely and suing poker companies for poker.
If you ask me, the very concept of patenting game mechanics or patenting “showing a minigame while the game is loading” sounds unenforcibly broad and absurd, but the Japanese patent office seems to view that differently.
candy crush tried to sue a match 3 style game. judge ruled that having similar mechanics was not enforceable. but this was also copyright not patent and different legal paths offer different rulings.
welcome to japanese law, where copyright extends to all works with no fair use clause. honestly im surprised they didnt hit the trademark suit since there was no reviews that didnt call it “pokemon with guns”.
Since Palworld never called it that, they dodged the trademark suit. Not surprised that Nintendo found something to try though.
Hope nintendo loses horribly.
Part of it too is this is going to be fought in a Tokyo court over in Japan. The copyright and patent laws are a bit different from the US copyright and patent laws, so we may see some unexpected results out of this.
Hey Tim, you’re not as litigious as Nintendo but I wanna ask anyway. Since the Zeke plush couldn’t get funded could I have permission to commission someone to make Zeke, Ethan, and Lucas plushies?
For personal use? I don’t care. But you can’t sell them.
Cool thanks! Yeah, just to have on my shelf with my CAD books.
I dont hear about palworld anymore, it was loud and fast but didnt last
(at least, not around me)(note: I cant edit my comment it says “the mail adress is invalid”)
Wasn’t that exactly what the devs stated earlier this year?
Something along the lines of “don’t expect any major update soon”…
The devs never meant to make a game that would last. They meant to make a game that was fun, whether people wanted to “one and done it” or not. And without any live service stuff, why would it need to last anyway? It’s a one time buy.
Even taking that into account it’s still doing reasonable numbers on Steam last I checked, just not the WTFhuge numbers it had on launch.
Anything and everything monster-friend related is up for lawsuits with Nintendo, I swear…
I think you can safely remove “monster-friend related” from that sentence and still be perfectly correct.
The suit of the lawyer can’t be a coincidence. Well done.
“Legalpuff, I choose you.”
(The idea of an evolved form of Jigglypuff being a lawyer is just too funny to me.)
I’ll just slap a tie on my electric rodent and call them Pikasue.
D@mnit.
I wish I had thought of that.
OMG, i almost snarfed my coffee when i read this:
“and help me continue operating this weird business model where I first give you my work for free, and then years later ask you to buy it.”
Good for Nintendo. Palworld’s blatantly obvious plagiarism of Pokémon and complete lack of own creativity should be punished, along with all the other clear rip-off games. It’s a shame that it’s so hard to prove copyright infringement / theft of intellectual property that they had to come after them with a more obscure lawsuit, but at least they actually got punished for their clearly immoral actions.
Copyright is hard to prove specifically BECAUSE it’s very narrow. If Disney had their way you could never have a mouse protagonist in any form of media ever because Mickey.
Say it with me now: “You can’t copyright an idea!”
Nintendo can copyright the appearance of Pikachu, but can’t stop you from making elemental mice of your own creation. Or satires of pikachu. Or any other number of things. This is a GOOD thing because it would make it impossible to have any kind of origional series because it’s similar to something else.
As a layperson, some of the comparison images in this article strain the credibility of “coincidence”. I mean some of them a re a stretch, but some of them are very “they obviously had the corresponding pokemon open in another window when they created this one”
https://www.ign.com/articles/pokmon-lawsuit-shows-just-how-seriously-nintendo-views-the-threat-of-palworld-patent-expert-says
Oh I don’t think anyone believe any of it happened by “coincidence” XD
The funniest part is IF Nintendo wins, they open themselves up to a lawsuit by SquareEnix. After all, the entire concept of monster trapping and taming (and many of the first Gen designs) were stolen from Dragon Quest. DQ5 (which came out 4 years before Pokémon) was the biggest game in the series and is the biggest RPG series in Japan. This is the one that introduced monster taming to the series, where they leveled up, could be geared, and function in your party. This feature was so popular it led to the DQMonsters spin-off series. So… yeah Nintendo didn’t… Read more »
If you don’t rate, litigate.
I was confident from the outset that Palworld was safe from copyright attacks. Similar style and design language isn’t enough to be a copyright violation. It has to be essentially the exact same characters and art, and it’s not in Palworld’s case.
I wasn’t expecting gameplay patents (which are some bullshit).
SOME of these characrers are similar enough I can see the argument of “You just had a picture of the pokemon on the next screen as reference when making this, didn’t you.” But some of the ‘comparisons’ Nintendo cites are a hell of a stretch to say they’re similar enough for copyright.
One thing I find very interesting about this whole thing is that from what I’ve been seeing on social media and gaming sites while the Japanese gamers are firmly behind Nintendo, a lot of the North American/European gamers seem to be on Palworld’s side. A bit of a ‘east vs west’ scenario.
Smoothbrain pokemon fans I guess.
Just going to say, I think you missed an opportunity by not making the lawyer look like Phoenix Wright. Hahaha
If they were suing for Pals looking like Pokemon sure, but sueing because they think they can enforce a patent on “collecting monsters”? They don’t have a leg to stand on.
In the USA, I’d agree 100%. But Japanese laws I’ve no idea how much similarity there is betwen them for precident.
If they win, I hope SE sues them into bankruptcy
The thing to understand is Nintendo are not expecting to “win” this in court. The copyright and patent issues are clearly BS (To the extent that they didn’t even attempt the copyright angle), and there’s zero chance that a court would ever find them in the right (At least not without basically causing a bunch of issues since the patents are clearly too broad and not unique). What Nintendo is doing is using the legal process itself as a hammer, the age old story of “While I know my lawsuit is BS, I have more money for lawyers than you… Read more »
I’m just surprised that Harmony Gold didn’t sue first.