Reminder that Nintendo is to Japan as Disney is to the USA.
We can only speculate what patents are involved, might be legit might not but it doesn’t have to be legit and the actual patent they obtained could be nonsense, they have the power to bend someone over a chair because they felt like it.
Also reminder apple managed to patent a rectangle. what countries allow to be patented is often bullshit at best.
Obligatory fuck Nintendo!
Nintendo files suit against a Pocketpair of deez nuts.
So… Um… If Nintendo patented elements of Pokemon (we don’t know what the patents are yet), then… Why is TemTem allowed to live? TemTem is literally one-to-one Pokemon, all but in name.
If, somehow, TemTem isn’t in violation of Nintendo’s patents, despite just being Pokemon made by someone else, then I’m very curious what Nintendo’s patent actually is.
Could it be the capture ball? TemTem uses cards. Palworld uses balls like Pokemon. Did Nintendo patent the idea of capturing creatures inside of balls, specifically? Is that why Nintendo never went after TemTem?
I would love to see a Palworld update that changes the balls to cubes. Same animations and effects, same textures, just stretched over a cube.
I’ve never heard of TemTem before and plugging it into Google Trends, it looks like it’s not even comparable to Palworld. It’s still somewhat big, looks like 500,000 copies sold. But still doesn’t really compare to what appears to be nearly 20 million Palworld players.
Companies lose rights to protect their IP if they don’t protect it themselves, so it may be in their best interest to go after the big competitors and pretend they’ve never heard of TemTem.
500,000 copies sold is not insignificant. Nintendo fries even the smallest of fish. They’ll literally go out of their way to fuck up someone’s small hobby project only a niche few even care about. So if Nintendo is turning blind eye to a game that copied them in every way one could possibly copy a Pokemon game, then there’s something else going on.
Remember, this is not a copyright case, this is a patent case. Considering Palworld is the only game vaguely similar to Pokemon in some minor ways that I’ve seen use spheres as a catching tool, I’m just (blindly) guessing it MIGHT have something to do with that.
If Temtem is a Pokemon ripoff then Pokemon is a Dragon Quest V ripoff. All these games involve collecting monsters through battle. Can anyone really patent “monster catching RPG?”
There are only two things Dragon Quest V and Pokemon have in common; monster taming through battle and they’re both turn based RPGs.
Have you played or seen TemTem? It’s literally Pokemon in every way, from mechanics, level design, to even how and what kind of moves the Tems can learn.
Nintendo goes after even the smallest infringements, so since they’ve never gone after TemTem it tells me the patent isn’t “monster catching RPG”. It’s more specific than that, and Palworld somehow infringes on it. As of yet we can only guess what the patent is.
I’m not sure why. TemTem, and a number of smaller projects like it, are basically exact copies of Pokemon and have been around far longer, some with succesfull kickstarter campaigns.
I remember Nintendo being RUTHLESS when people over at GBATemp tried making a smash bros clone for the NDS… For free.
Fuck nintendo. I really hope this blows up in their face like their stupid fucking “King Kong is dk” lawsuit. Fucking bullies. The irony that they blatantly stole the designs of pokemon from dragon quest but are butthurt at palworld for pAtEnT vIoLaTiOn is gross. So glad I just pirate their shit.
Yep.
Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Nintendo Co., Ltd.
Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Nintendo Co., Ltd. was a 1983 legal case heard by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York by Judge Robert W. Sweet. In their complaint, Universal Studios alleged that Nintendo’s video game Donkey Kong was a trademark infringement of King Kong, the plot and characters of which Universal claimed as their own. Nintendo argued that Universal had themselves proven that King Kong’s plot and characters were in the public domain in Universal City Studios, Inc. v. RKO General, Inc.