Patent No. 7545191
- [Patent application date: July 30, 2024]
- [Patent registration date: August 27, 2024]
- Relates to a player character throwing an item at a character in the field, which triggers combat.
Patent No. 7493117
- [Patent application date: February 26, 2024]
- [Patent registration date: May 22, 2024]
- Basically an extension of the above, relating to being able to capture Pokémon in the wild rather than just in combat like previous generations.
Patent No. 7528390
- [Patent application date: March 5, 2024]
- [Patent registration date: July 26, 2024]
- Relating to being able to ride creatures in the open world.
Note that every single one of these patents was filed after palworld was released, and they’re all awfully vague about what they actually cover.
That last patent is bullshit, are they going to sue every game that has horse mounts? This is from 1981, and has mounts.
Relates to a player character throwing an item at a character in the field, which triggers combat.
Minecraft lets you throw snowballs at monsters.
Relating to being able to ride creatures in the open world.
Time for every game with horses ever to be sued by Nintendo.
Software patents usually are shitty like that. And weirdly “state or the art” doesn’t seem to apply to them. Their only purpose is trolling your competition and the consumer is left with fewer and poorer choices and higher prices due to royalty costs.
One of the most infamous examples is Microsoft filing a patent for the mouse double click in 2002, getting it granted in 2004 while the thing was actually developed before the 80s (and not by Microsoft, of course).
I question the usefulness for society of patents in general but software patents especially should be abolished.
I’ll take “shit you shouldn’t be able to patent” for 1000 alex.
You could argue GTA violates this patent, I throw bullets at dudes and it “triggers combat” \s
You might look at the dates Pocketpair gave there (which are correct) and think — well, they were filed after, so how can Nintendo sue using those? The answer is complicated. What Pocketpair don’t say, is that these patents are from a parent patent[1] which was registered in 2021 and approved in 2023, meaning it very much does end up applying here to Palworld.
Even if we took all these patents as valid back in 2021, they’d still be fucking stupid
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION Therefore, an object of the present invention is to provide a game program, a game system, an information processing device, and an information processing method that can smoothly switch between a plurality of boarding objects in a game in which a player character boards an object and moves. [emphasis mine]
Nintendo mentions something from 2017, but I’m pretty sure World of Warcraft did something similar before 2017, possibly other MMOs as well. Reading a bit further, it sounds like automatically changing from an air mount to a ground or water mount without need for input, which Palworld doesn’t do. You can glide and “auto dismount” once you hit the ground with certain pals, but that’s it, you can’t instantly change from a mounted pal to a different pal
They are all bullshit, but holy fuck, how the hell were they even allowed to register the third one ?
No, the sneaky thing is that they are older patents that were amended/updated after Palworld was released. But the initial patents are older than Palworld.
In a sane world, the case should be decided by the original text of the patents, not the updated one.
What am I saying, in a sane world these patents should not exist.
By the third patent: Elden Ring, WoW, Everquest, Neverwinter, SW: The Old Republic, Final Fantasy, and many many others have infringed Nintendo patents. Fuck Nintendo.
How such generic features are even awarded patents is beyond me. None of these are even remotely exclusive to Pokemon or Palworld.
EDIT The grossest thing about this is that these patents were all filed this year, meaning they were filed with the exclusive intention of building a case against Palworld. There really is no level to which Nintendo won’t stoop.
