For reference, the allegedly infringing patents are these:
Hold my bacon, one can patent the idea that a game character switches mounts depending on a given state? (Image 3)
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.
Yeah software patents should be like “this exact code” or something along these lines. I mean patenting “hello world” should give you billions
Holy hell.
Even by the standard of “all software patents are nonsense”, these are a fucking joke.
How do these not apply to the majority of games, these sound so insanely broad. Patents are so stupid.
But why in english if it’s (seemingly) domestic only.
Are they mandated to submit in English?
These are the patent publication dates, for more details you can check https://patentscope.wipo.int/ with patents 7545191, 7493117 and 7528390
These look like they are after Palworld was released. Was Nintendo just sitting on the patent since Pokeman red/blue? What an unintuitive legal system they have over in Japan.
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.
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.
Software parents are such absolute horseshit.
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.
Nintendo are the baddies
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.
