Nintendo are now Patent Trolls

[Geno]

Don't confuse the art design with the gameplay design.  You really don't want to live in a world where gameplay mechanics can be patented.  Warcraft and Starcraft wouldn't exist without Dune II after all.

In any case, as expected, the U.S. patent office are reexamining this software patent, and good.

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/pokemon...y-is-good/

Just like how Amazon should never be granted a patent on a "digital shopping cart", Nintendo has no business trying to patent the concept of capturing monsters to battle other monsters.... not least because they didn't even come up with it originally in the first place.

This conflict has always existed in gaming, though.  Back in the early '80s there were lawsuits over clone games, and some of those lawsuits won.  I don't agree with some of those decisions -- I think that despite clearly building off of the same formula K.C. Munchkin is more than different enough from Pac-Man to certainly be something that should not have been banned for being a copycat, that's absurd -- but there is a line there where some things were just straight copies.  I don't think the complete copies should be okay.  I know that patenting specific game design elements is uncommon, but it has happened a few times; articles about this case mention Namco's 'minigames in a loading screen' patent and Nintendo's patents on motion controllers.

Is Palworld different from Pokemon?  Maybe, I don't know much about the gameplay (I've never cared much about any Pokemon style game after all), but the art design obviously blatantly copies Pokemon.  I will not defend them for a second, not when all they're doing is copying.  Defending your IP is not being a patent troll, the two things are different.

In this case, Nintendo got this patent in 2021.  I'm very unclear on why they decided that throwing a pokeball in an open world is oh so different from how it worked before -- throwing a pokeball in a battle screen instead of in the world itself -- but I guess that's what the patent is about?  How strange.  I don't get the distinction, aren't they the same thing?  I don't know offhand if there were 'capture monsters and use them as your party' games before Pokemon did that in 1996, but this case is about if games did that before Pokemon Legends Arceus and the answer seems to be 'kinda'.  Maybe Nintendo will lose this but who knows.  If they lose the patent it will have nothing to do with Palworld though.  But again, the idea that a pokeball in an open world is something different from one in a separate battle screen makes no sense.

Hmm... I don't know about other games that involve capturing monsters in balls besides Pokémon (and I guess Palworld? I just Googled it, and if you'd told me this was the newly revealed next generation of Pokémon, I wouldn't have questioned it), but the trope of summoning monsters to do battle for you predates Pokémon and exists in other games besides Pokémon that have come out since. In particular, there's Ni No Kuni, which has often been described as "Pokémon meets [insert JRPG franchise here--I've heard Final Fantasy, Dragon Age, Breath of Fire, Kingdom Hearts, Tales, and others]". The monsters in this game are captured using magical enchantment to invoke loyalty in the monsters, and then they are summoned and dismissed using magic (conjuration magic, if you will).

Honestly, the "Pokémon trainer" is just a variant of the summoner class in many tabletop and electronic RPGs. Final Fantasy X and some subsequent entries in the series have allowed the player to full-on control the summonable monsters (Final Fantasy has had summoning as a feature since before Pokémon existed, though X was the first entry to make the summons fully playable). Various D&D classes allow the summoning of familiars, swarms, and even eidolons as in the case of the summoner class in Pathfinder (not D&D, but basically D&D). A few examples: druids can summon swarms of insects and other animals, wizards can summon a single small animal as a familiar such as an owl or a rat with the Find Familiar spell, Pact of the Chain warlocks can summon a pixie, fairy, or tiny dragon, and paladins can summon a horse with a Find Steed spell or a pegasus or griffon with a Find Greater Steed spell.

And then of course, there's Digimon, Pokémon's long-time competitor, but Digimon weren't really collectable; from what I remember of the show (it's been a long time since I watched it, and I haven't watched any new season that's come out since 2001 or 2002), each child had one single Digimon partner who could evolve into different forms, but they didn't go around collecting other Digimon and build entire teams as is the case with Pokémon. Not sure if lawsuits were ever involved, but there was a lot of back-and-forth bickering between fans. Same with Monster Rancher, Yu-Gi-Oh, and other "monster anime." For a while, it was an entire genre of anime, games, and cards.

Again, I don't know enough about Palworld to weigh in on this lawsuit, but like I said, that Google search shows me that the art style, if nothing else, is very reminiscent of Pokémon.