this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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‘Cold-Blooded Business’: Nintendo Is Patent Trolling Palworld Because It Got Too Big (www.404media.co)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
68 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

So you don’t think these patents are going after any aspect of Palworld that players would recognize as a defining feature of a Pokémon game?

I mean, there's like a mechanic where you throw the spheres, right? And this is a very obvious, in your face system [that’s very much like Pokémon]. But I think that it will be a lot more technical than this. Nintendo would have dug through every single action inside the game, they would have probably reverse engineered it, and just find ways to sue these guys. 

You can bet your life that Nintendo hates this company, and they couldn't find an angle with the character designs. This is why they are not mentioned in their press release. So they come with these technical peculiarities. So I personally believe, if you act like this, you can sue like 90 percent of the game developers in the world. I'm sure there's like thousands of games that have a confirmation screen when you go from sleep mode to resuming the game right, but if you basically trigger the wrath of Nintendo, they will come after you.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think this is a bad take, and the interviewer seems to contradict himself. He suggests that Nintendo goes after companies who copy them, but also mentions another company they've sued for patent infringement for a game that didn't resemble any Nintendo property. So it seems like it has less to do with whether or not you "trigger the wrath of Nintendo", and more whether you use their patents or not.

It should be noted that this is all just conjecture from somebody not related to the case at all. Nothing in this interview reveals any details about the actual case in question.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Their patents are not for technological innovative things at all but are for things like "presenting a confirmation pop-up window after resuming a game from sleep” or for in a isometric game projecting a shadow for a character that's behind something so that the player know it's there.

They're the kind of obvious solutions that any expert in that domain would develop independently if asked to solve that problem, and patent applications for shit like that would be laughed out of the Patent Office anywhere else than Japan (and in the US before their Patent System went to shit in the late 90s).

I very much doubt this shit is valid in Europe unless there's some kind of Treaty that means Japanese patents also apply here. If taken to court in the US such patents would most likely be invalidated - the problem in the US is that the Patent Office will accept any old bollocks obvious to doman experts and containing zero innovation, not that Patent Law actually protects this shit and they will be upheld if somebody has the money needed to dispute them in to Court.

However this is Japan and the Japanese Patent System, so it's probably rotten to the core.