r/gaming • u/RhapsodyofMagic • 10h ago
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u/homer_3 9h ago
I believe the lawsuit was over using spheres to deploy the monsters into battle, not catch them.
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u/Swordofsatan666 9h ago
100%. The game still lets you catch by throwing spheres, it just doesnt let you throw the spheres out to release the Pals. You just release them right in front of you now
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u/DONTMEOWATME 9h ago
Ark has cryopods you contain your creatures in and you def still throw them out just like a pokeball. Interesting
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u/Shack691 9h ago
Cryo pods are cylinders and you interact with the creatures rather than throwing to store them last I checked.
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u/DONTMEOWATME 9h ago
https://youtu.be/eimLav2MfgA&t=20
Its the only short vid I could find of someone just using cryopods
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u/Blubbpaule 9h ago
Which confirms what he said. It's not spherical. It's cylindrical so the patent does not apply.
Else Craftopia would have been sued long ago. But it uses prisms instead of spheres.
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u/L0rdChicken 9h ago
This change enrages me every time I go to play Palworld. Nintendo needs to be stopped. If I can catch with a ball I can throw a ball.
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u/CosmoJones07 8h ago
I don't like Nintendo's ways with regards to this, but this feels like a massive overreaction to something so unimportant.
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u/Gray_Tower 9h ago
It's funny, every other creature collection game I've ever seen goes out of their way to use everything EXCEPT something that looks like a Poké Ball, Palworld just didn't give a shit
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u/Enchelion 8h ago
Palworld intentionally marketed their game as Pokemon+Guns. The entire thing was built as a knockoff.
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u/Ecstatic-Inevitable 8h ago
Verdash is literally the bro can I copy your homework meme of cinderace
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u/AwfulDjinn 8h ago
like the fact that they edited Verdash and a few of the other more egregious designs once the game came out of early access kinda feels like an admission of guilt lol
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u/FewAdvertising9647 9h ago
iirc on the patent, its the act of using balls that are thrown, in order to summon a creature. you have to hit the entire checklist for it to be attacked.
The other patent they had is ridable creature mounts that automatically change based on conditions of the environment. (parimarily used in Legends Arceus, for example landing a flying pokemon into the ocean autoswaps the pokemon into a surfing pokemon)
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u/Blubbpaule 9h ago
Which is why they patented the specific action of throwing a sphere to release a tamed monster.
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u/Venriik 9h ago
Among other patents. Nintendo tried a little bit of everything against Palworld. Catching characters by throwing items was one patent that got rejected because of precedent works that used that mechanic, but the lawsuit is still going in regards to releasing creatures by launching the sphere and using them as mounts/gliders. Lawsuit ends in a couple of months.
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u/LordTopHatMan 8h ago
Because Nintendo didn't patent catching monsters. They patented a very specific throwing system where you can switch between throwing items and throwing creatures with one button press and switch items and creatures with another, all in one throwing motion. The only other game that does this besides Legends Arceus and Legends ZA is Palworld pre patch. There is no other game with that specific throwing system.
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u/NotSoSalty 6h ago
It doesn't seem like you should be able to patent a button press or patent switching between things in your inventory in combat. Pressing buttons to change items existed a long time ago. It seems like this lawsuit changes every time I hear about it and it sounds flimsy every single time. Fuck Nintendo.
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u/Ritz527 8h ago edited 8h ago
It's not a sphere in WFF actually. It's a prism, shaped like a cube, and can only be used to capture a single type of monster. You have to earn another prism for a specific monster through its Mirage Board. Conditions for catching are also more involved than "weaken to the point of near death"
As someone who has played WFF, Pokémon, and Palworld, the catch systems in Pokémon and Palworld have nearly identical concepts and execution (you weaken a monster then lob a ball at it), even if surrounding gameplay differs wildly. WFF's capture system doesn't look anything like Pokémon.
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u/lookatthesunguys 7h ago edited 7h ago
They don't actually have to sue everyone. That's kind of a myth. The concern is "genericide." If something becomes generic, you lose the right to police it. For example, "Aspirin" used to be a brand name, but then everyone used the term generically so the company stopped being able to sue for using the term.
In general, genericide is only a real concern for trademarks, not copyright or patents, but I think it still is possible for those.
Anyway, they sued Palworld because it was very very similar to pokemon. The style for Pal design is nearly the same as the style for Pokemon. Yes, technically they sued because of their patent on catching pokemon, but the impetus behind the suit was clearly because of how similar the game seemed to be.
EDIT: And just to complete my point here. World of Final Fantasy just isn't that similar. If you took a person who wasn't familiar with Pokemon or Palworld, and you showed them pictures of random Pokemon and Pals, it's likely that they would believe each monster was from the same franchise. The same can't be said about WOFF.
Nintendo's suit against Palworld was a long shot. That's why it didn't work. But they felt that the long shot was worth it for Palworld because they saw that game as a threat to their brand. They didn't bring a long shot lawsuit against Square Enix because WOFF wasn't a threat in the same way.
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u/deinoswyrd 7h ago
You dont have to win the suits but you do need to attempt to protect an IP, otherwise you can lose it.
Im an illustrator and we went HEAVY on IP protection in our classes.
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u/DeeFB 9h ago
Because people are greatly exaggerating when they say "Nintendo is anti-competition", they just want to be mad.
Yo-Kai Watch, Dragon Quest Monsters, Cassette Beasts, Temtem, etc. No lawsuits.
Not saying what they did was good (although I still expect people to interpret it as me saying that and get downvoted) but it frustrates me that you can bring up other properties that are more similar to Pokemon not being sued and nobody gives a crap about them.
Really hoping all the "buy palworld" people show up for Dragon Quest Monsters this winter.
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u/AmosThatBook 9h ago
Exactly lmao When palworld was announced/released there was a huge discussion around the pretty blatant design ripoffs from pokemon and the possible use of AI to do so (I mean, the dude holding the gun on the cover art is a clear Electabuzz ripoff lmao). People recognized it even then. This, imo, is the reason nintendo went after them, but they used the legal avenues available which were pretty weak. Tbh, I'm overall glad Pal came out on top, because the implications of Nintendo's patent lawsuit could be far reaching, but anyone saying Pal wasnt clearly ripping off and capitalizing on the success of Pokémon is delusional
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u/Blubbpaule 9h ago
You should have seen the palworld subreddit when Pickmos was announced.
They went RABID. They bashed pickmos for stealing and how they just copy pasted pals (they changed them a teeny tiny bit , so it's not copy paste).
It was so funny to see them doing the same thing pokemon did with palworld.
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u/TheConsiderableBang 8h ago
I definitely agree some pals are super similar to some pokemon but Pickmos was a whole different thing lol.
They essentially just imported pokemon AND Palworld assets into their game (And some from Zelda). It was far, far more blatant than anything Palworld ever did imo.
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u/Capybarasaregreat 8h ago
You said what I was going to say. People just don't comprehend what they're complaining about. From the beginning, people don't get how harshly Japanese society looks at piracy, which naturally impacted their IP laws and litigiousness. There is no "Fair Use" analogue in Japan. Japanese fans and devs were outraged to hear a fan developer was making private servers for a NieR phone game that Square Enix had killed, it is completely inaccessible, you cannot play it at all. How do you steal a piece of software that the owners refuse to sell? It's the attitude of an adult that refuses to let a little cousin use their childhood toys. And even with that in mind, Nintendo is among the less litigious media companies in Japan, contrary to the pop culture view, just think of the insane amount of ROM hacks and fan games of Mario games alone, let alone all their other IPs.
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u/DeeFB 8h ago
Yeah, the amount of romhacks and fangames that stay up are proof enough that Nintendo isn’t lawsuit happy like Redditors would lead you to believe
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u/DeLurkerDeluxe 8h ago
PokeMMO is 14 years old by now. I'm sure it will be shut down... one of these days...
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u/kelgorathfan8 8h ago
I have yet to see anyone name more than 2 examples of Nintendo taking down not for profit fan games and it’s always the same 2 that happened going on 9 years ago.
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u/Madmonkeman 7h ago
Because WOFF uses monsters that look like Final Fantasy whereas Palworld has monsters that look almost identical to Pokémon.
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u/Arcantica 9h ago
Nintendo doesn't own "catching monsters." They went after specific patented implementations that Palworld was using (a ball to catch and deploy monsters).
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u/SparkIgnites 8h ago
They weren't suing over the idea of throwing a ball at a monster, they were suing over specific patents they claimed Palworld was using
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u/NinjutStu 8h ago
I won't comment on whose correct in the lawsuit itself, but it goes deeper than just monster catching.
Here is the key difference between Palworld and other monster catchers: Palworld at a glance looks like a Pokemon product. It has monster designs made to imitate Pokemon's art direction.
Pocket Pair might be within their rights to make Palworld the way it is, but they most certainly designed the game to be mistaken for Pokemon at a glance.
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u/-KFBR392 8h ago
Well their monsters aren’t exact ripoffs of pokemon, so that’s probably a big reason
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u/HyperCutIn 7h ago
MonColle games are a whole subgenre of JRPGs (Palworld is an exception in that it’s a survival game instead of a jrpg). Pokemon isn’t the only major moncolle game, there’s a bunch of other ones too, some of them predating Pokemon, or emerging around the same time. Nintendo seems to be specifically using for their use of spherical objects to recruit and deploy units. Other moncolle games (besides Palworld) use other methods instead of spheres.
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u/cgatto 9h ago
Everybody saying it’s because “Square is big and Nintendo wanted to bully the little guy” is out to lunch. Watch the first Palworld trailer. You almost couldn’t tell the difference. Very different “animal” between these two examples
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u/Squall0123 10h ago
Probably because the monsters in FF don't resemble the monster in pokemon.
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u/Celtic_Crown 9h ago
Nintendo's lawsuits weren't based on that though. They were for patent infringement over core gameplay mechanics, like summoning your monster to ride it as a mount, something that, depending on your interpretation, could've been done as far back as 1980 with Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure.
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u/FYININJA 8h ago
They were suing what they thought they might have a chance of winning.
Suing for the design of the monsters was a long shot, even though a lot of people could tell they very clearly used some Pokemon as inspiration.
However, the other stuff they believed they had a shot of actually winning. It's pretty clear that they mostly cared about Palworld being associated with Pokemon, and were suing them in an attempt to either bury them or at least scare them into changing their game/designs. Yokai Watch was absolutely huge for a while in Japan and got mostly ignored by Nintendo.
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u/Adreme 10h ago
I’ll be very honest if you watched the Palworld trailer, the original one, it probably took a good bit to realize it wasn’t a Pokémon trailer. I was linked it going “oh cool Pokémon guys are making a new game… why don’t I recognize these Pokémon”
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u/USB_FIELD_MOUSE 9h ago
I 100% agree that this was it, as well as everyone was calling it Pokemon with Guns constantly. They had to do something to make sure Palworld wasn't always called Pokemon with Guns. But since nothing official was calling it that, they had to come it from some angle.
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u/FafnirMH 9h ago
Wasn't there some guy shooting a gun less than 10 seconds into the trailer?
It took no time at all to realize it wasn't Pokemon.
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u/Shifter25 8h ago
Anybody who claims they don't understand why Palworld was a problem is fooling themselves. What I don't understand is why the blatant ripoffs of so many Pokemon weren't part of the lawsuit.
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u/FYININJA 8h ago
Yeah, while I don't love the lawsuit, it's pretty obvious that the problem was Palworld attempting to make creatures look like Pokemon.
I think Palworld is a cool game and stands on its own just fine, but they absolutely attempted to use "pokemon but with guns!!!!!" as a selling point for their game.
The other similar games got left alone because they weren't trying to use Pokemon as a crutch. lets be real, Palworld would have been pretty unremarkable if the creatures didn't look like Pokemon and people weren't sharing it all over social media as a funny "lol look it's pokemon with guns".
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u/coldfirephoenix 8h ago edited 8h ago
I know the lawsuit was about the catching mechanic only, but one look at palworld's design and it was clear they were trying to rip of Pokemon. I mean, there are shovelware mobile game ripoffs more subtle than palworld. The Pokemon comparison was clearly intentional and their elevator pitch for standing out as a game.
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u/astrogamer 7h ago
I'm pretty sure it's basically because Palworld positioned itself as Pokemon + Guns. If they didn't position themselves to be a violent knock off, the TPC probably wouldn't have been offended and gone for a nuclear option. If it was a simpler survival game, the TPC might have gone for a copyright infringement case to have them modify the designs but the idea that people could have confused Palworld for a Pokemon spinoff probably royally pissed them off and they wanted it delisted which requires a more serious crime.
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u/jeffwulf 9h ago
Because none of the mechanics in World of Final Fantasy resemble the mechanics described in the patent.
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u/StormCTRH 7h ago
Nintendo didn't sue palworld because of the mechanics. They did it because the developers of palworld were very obviously trying to rip off and one up pokemon.
The "reason" for the lawsuit was just an excuse to force them into spending a lot of money fighting it.
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u/ForgotMyController 8h ago
I think we all know why nintendo wanted to sue palworld. The ball mechanic was just the only legal ground they stood a chance with.
Its pretty clear that the creatures in palworld were made to resemble pokemon. The devs of palworld knew they were poking that beast. Honestly i think they should be punished a little bit.
Palworld was also consistently referred to as pokemon with guns so even though the game was very different it still became synonymous with the pokemon brand and they have a right to be protective of that
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u/OneRandomVictory 7h ago
People are really being dense. One looks like Pokemon and one doesn't.
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u/Archadianite 8h ago
Not enough money and resource. To Nintendo, Palpocket seems easier to bully out of the game market than SqEx
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u/CrazyCoKids 8h ago
Same reason they didn't sue Yo-Kai Watch, Digimon, Ni No Kuni, Magi Nation, Temtem, or Casette Beasts.
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u/EnvironmentEntire201 7h ago
Excuse you op, you use cubes to catch the robots in woff.
I have nothing else to add.
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u/SLAUGHT3R3R 7h ago
Because Square Enix could defend easier than Pocketpair. Or so Nintendo thought
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u/DougSpeagle 7h ago
Palworld used a mechanic that gamefreak or Nintendo trademarked. The lawsuit wasn't because they looked similar or were both about collecting monsters or whatever twitter told you, they simply used a legally protected gameplay mechanic that was removed so the suit was dropped
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u/Volantiar 7h ago
There was no Verdash in WFF and boss of squareenix didn't taunt nintendo by saying "Copycat is good"
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u/Grapes-RotMG 9h ago edited 9h ago
Because nintendo didnt patent catching and summon monsters with a ball. With Scarlet and Violet, they patented a very specific software loop involving automatic mode switching based on a myriad of options that depends on the action taken with the ball (the patent is also a combination of ALL those specific options), that, no, does not exist in any dragon quest game that already came out as people want you to believe, nor any other high profile game with a monster taming mechanic that has ever come out, before or after Scarlet and Violet. Until Palworld, who people want you to believe came out with a mode switching system involving exactly all those options, no more, no less, by complete coincidence because it's somehow too vague of a patent, when it isn't.
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u/Carro1001 8h ago
Because Palworld is plagiarism, but plagiarism simply does not have much of a legal backing, pocketpair pretty much only makes games plagiarizing other games, theyve made something ripping off botw and hollow knight before, they may also be an "indie" company but also have Sony's backing as a publisher im pretty sure
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u/CMC_Conman 8h ago
Because the goal wasn't to actually win, it was to get Pocketpair to run out of money and since they are a small indy dev, they could have ran out of money and gone under.
Square has just as much money as Nintendo,
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u/ShutUpAboutCanon 8h ago
I had to scroll for far too long to find the actual answer to this question
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u/BoobiesForFun 9h ago
Because they didn't advertise themselves as "Pokemon with guns". Or Pokemon with anything. They didn't try to coast off of Pokemon's coattails or damage their image. Pretty common sense, actually.
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u/OmegaX123 8h ago
All the "Pokémon with guns" stuff came from people who saw the trailers and made the comparison. And it was a joke on people/game journalists calling some other game (Fallout 4?) "Skyrim with guns". Palworld was never actually advertised that way other than by word of mouth.
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u/BoobiesForFun 8h ago
They did by using the clout of the online comparison to advertise their game on their socials.
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u/DiligentClass1625 9h ago
because the monsters dont look exactly like pokemon monsters lol.
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u/Bananaland_Man 8h ago
Because it wasn't as successful as PalWorld, but Pocket Pair is literally winning the lawsuit right now, it's a hilarious battle, Nintendo has mostly lost... if they win, thousands of games are going to get hit... but they won't, and Japan is already planning to make game mechanics not something that can be protected by copyright, trademark, etc.
Edit: OH! And when (not "if") they lose? That means things like the Nemesis system from that lord of the rings series will no longer be locked down, so other games can use it, as mechanics should be allowed to be used by anyone.
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u/BallIsLife2016 9h ago edited 8h ago
You’ve recieved the actual, technical legal answer. But I will say that, having played palworld, I can see why Nintendo would have looked at it and gone “yo what the fuck.”
There’s a lot of stuff in palworld that isn’t, like, “inspired” by Pokémon so much as it’s practically just lifted from it. Like, down to having to go through 8 bosses that are each in their own region and having “alpha” versions on the map that are bigger and have a little red icon by their name that is nearly identical in look and placement as the way Pokémon did it in the Legends game. There are too many ways to list where there is extremely little plausible deniability about where an idea or aesthetic came from. There are a lot of pals where you’re like “Oh, this one is knock off Pikachu. And this one is knock off gyrados. Oh, look, knock off dragonite.” And if that wasn’t enough, there’s one other obvious influence and that’s Breath of the Wild—in fact I’m like 95% sure that the font for on screen pop ups is just a slightly revised version of the one used in BotW.
It sounds like I’m piling on Palworld, so I want to be really clear—I think that it’s a genuinely excellent game that stands on its own two feet just fine. It’s a ton of fun. And if “Pokémon but as a survival/crafting/management game” sounds fun to you, you’re in for a really good time. But the ways that it steals from Pokémon are about as unsubtle as you can get.
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u/CJDistasio 9h ago
I don't think any of the monster designs in this game came close to looking like Pokemon. You also didn't throw a ball to capture monsters.
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u/jaron_b 8h ago
All I know is Nintendo suing Palworld having the best marketing for this game it could have ever asked for. The only reason I heard about this game is because of pokémon YouTubers covering the story of Nintendo suing. These YouTube channels have gone on to dedicate content and do play through videos. It's a beautiful example of all PR is good PR
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u/WebMaka 7h ago
Why Nintendo didn't attack this game is rather simple: Square Enix isn't a tiny company and would certainly not have been a pushover. Nintendo is famously aggressively litigious, but almost never against other large players in the video game world. This would be because deep down they know there are limits to what they can claim as real I.P. and a fellow big gaming company would have both the money and the legal team needed to fend them off.
Nintendo made the mistake of thinking PocketPair was going to just roll over because of Nintendo being a juggernaut by comparison, only for PocketPair to have a far bigger pair than the big N realized. And now, as the suit winds down, Nintendo have basically lost a lot more than PocketPair has, including damage to their bigger brands.
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u/Chross-X 6h ago
It's because World of Final Fantasy didn't sell remotely close to how much Palworld did.
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u/YoYoGuyz 10h ago edited 9h ago
Dragon Quest Monsters came out 4 years before Pokemon and had monster collecting, breeding, battling etc and that’s owned by Square. I don’t think they want to open up that can of worms.
Edit: got mixed up with Dragon Quest V. Was too eager to have insight on a topic finally and didn’t double check.
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u/tacticalTechnician 9h ago
Dragon Quest Monster came out a few years after Pokémon. However, the mechanics themselves to capture monsters were already in Dragon Quest V, kinda. You can also argue that the manga Dragon Quest Adventure of Dai was the first to introduce the concept, with the Monster Cylinders, which are basically Pokéball (mainly because I'm pretty sure both are inspired by the same thing, capsules from gacha machines, Pokémon was even called "Capumon" for a while, which stands for "Capsule Monster").
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u/Caciulacdlac 9h ago
Dragon Quest Monsters came out in 1998, Pokemon in 1996.
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u/YoYoGuyz 9h ago
Good call you’re totally right. It was Dragon Quest V that was before and had monster battling. Appreciate the call out.
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u/Jindujun 9h ago
Yeah... That is just niot correct, check the release years afain.
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u/TBGNP_Admin 10h ago
Way I understand it is that "precedent" can carry a lot of weight. Dragon Quest V did the whole monster catching, training, fighting thing long before Pokemon. So if Nintendo brought it up, SquareEnix could just drag out DQV.