Nintendo are now Patent Trolls

[Dark Jaguar]

You may have heard the whole Palworld scandal already, getting misreported with articles going on about the similarity of various designs to certain Pokemon.  I want to clarify something here.  Nintendo is not suing about copyright, so whatever you feel about how close the art design is, it's not relevant to the case.

It's a patent suit.  They are suing over the concept of using small items to catch large monsters.  This is on the heels of another recent suit where Nintendo sued another company for using their patented concept of using a touch screen to emulate an analog stick, from Super Mario 64 DS specifically.  These suits are both based in Japan, where their patent office is way too lenient.  Such patents would never have been granted in the U.S., and notably, it reminds me of Capcom suing SNK way back in the day over stealing the concept of a "fighting game", and of the lawsuit against Namco for using the concept of a loading screen mini-game.

Back in 2013, a case regarding software patents went to the Supreme court here in the U.S., and it was determined that such patents are invalid as they are too obvious and hinder innovation in the software space... which they did.  It didn't help that these software patents were badly defined in the first place.  That is, someone just comes up with the idea of "do this, but in software" with no actual implementation developed, no source code or anything, and someone who actually does the work of realizing it then gets sued.  It's called a "patent troll", and yes, it's ridiculous.

Nintendo has crossed a horrible threshold, and they've become one of the worst threats in not just the gaming industry but software as a whole.  I hope they lose this, and lose BIG, because this is the kind of nonsense that can stifle creativity and cause all kinds of companies to go after each other.  Just keep in mind that Nintendo will likely get sued right after this by Atlus, because catching monsters and training them comes from Shin Megami Tensei before Nintendo came up with their "Monsters in my Pocket".  However, Japanese law being what it is, Nintendo is likely to win there.  Here's hoping the U.S. decision stands as far as such software patents go here, but recently, other software companies have been lobbying congress critters to pass new laws establishing software patents back into reality again, as well as DNA patents.

Let me be very clear on this point.  Yes, it's pretty obvious how similar these "pals" are to pokemon, but Nintendo didn't go after them on that, or on copyright.  The very fact Nintendo is pursuing this as a patent case is a tacit admission they know they wouldn't win a copyright suit, that the designs and storyline backgrounds are different ENOUGH that they are their own thing, just like Captain Marvel not QUITE being Superman, or... well all of the OTHER cases of comic book characters clearly being "inspired" by existing characters.  Heck we've got Namor coming out to retake the throne of Atlantis from that uptstart Aqua Man pretty soon, so that's still a thing.

[A Black Falcon]

Palworld is such an obvious ripoff that I imagine Nintendo has a case.  It's not just a similar game, it copies Nintendo stuff exactly...

I don't think it's a general suit about 'catching monsters'.  I think that Palworld exactly copied the catching mechanic from Pokemon, something other monster-catching games don't do.

[Dark Jaguar]

Again, this isn't a copyright suit or you'd have a point, it's a software patent suit, and frankly, no, absolutely not.  By that logic, Sonic "exactly copied" busting blocks to get powerups, and Duke Nukem 3D exactly copied collecting health packs to recover health in that particular "Doom clone".  Art of Fighting, and literally every other fighting game beyond "Street Fighter II" and anything Capcom made, wouldn't exist.  You do NOT want to take Nintendo's side on this ABF.  They're wrong, and you know it.  Not to mention, though I already have, how this extends far beyond video games.  Operating systems themselves, for example, or web browsers, or any web site using a "shopping cart".  You should look into why "software patents" as a concept were ruled invalid by the Supreme Court.

You think Palworld's the first game to use a small object to catch a big creature?  It wasn't even Pokemon.  Artistically it looks pretty close, but that's irrelevant in a patent suit.  All that matters is the function, and the function has existed since certain Dungeons and Dragons spells to capture familiars in small jars.

[Dark Jaguar]

Also, and I just have to add a few things...  Nintendo are being complete hypocrites here.  Look, Palworld isn't really my cup of tea.  I didn't get the game, but I DO know it's very distinctly different from how a typical pokemon game plays.  It's a survival-construction game, like your Seven Days to Die or your Mine's Craft, and everything having to do with that.  You fight alongside these critters... with guns that are... look the guns are very obviously not going to make gun manufacturers happy with how similar they are but... games have been getting away with ripping off gun designs but just calling them something else for decades now so I doubt that's really going to change.  Point is, this is evolving off the ideas of pokemon, not just straight "stealing" the game concept, but more to the point, Nintendo does this ALL the time.  Let me list a few direct examples.

Firstly, that first Nintendo patent suit, they sued a company over the concept of using a touch screen as an analog stick.  That's purely a software implementation, from the very company that had to settle out of court for using a touch screen as a game control device in the first place.

We can ignore Donkey Kong, because it's resemblance to King Kong is a copyright issue, not a patent issue, and well, Universal lost that copyright lawsuit anyway.

But, Balloon Fight is Joust.  It just is.  In fact, Balloon Fight has FAR more in common with Joust than Palworld has in common with Pokemon (in terms of game mechanic design).

Hey remember Devil World?  That's Pac-Man.  That's very clearly Pac-Man.  Now with both of these examples, did Nintendo add onto the idea?  Sure.  Balloon fight added an "adventure mode" that scrolled from right to left in a long level, and Devil World added scrolling around up and down and left and right with a little devil guy in hot pants ordering little imp things to do it.  But, clearly Nintendo doesn't think that's a good argument in defense of "stealing" a game design concept.

Donkey Kong?  Hey, I CAN mention something here.  Space Panic.  Donkey Kong is Space Panic, but with a jump button added.

In any case, any argument you make in favor of Nintendo can't bring up the art design.  That isn't relevant in a patent case.  I won't be bothering to defend the pal's appearance in any case.  Just the raw mechanics, and the raw mechanics were already in existence before pokemon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster-taming_game

Just take a look at the history.  The usage of tiny balls is a matter of art, not mechanic.  The taming and catching of monsters is the important thing.  But, if that's what matters to you, Enix had already invented that idea in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotrek

There you go.  Catching monsters in little capsules and sending them out to fight, right there in 1994.  Done.  Game set match, Nintendo can't claim a patent.

[A Black Falcon]

Why put so much effort into defending a company who release ripoff games with copied characters in them?  Seriously, if they're going to so blatantly copy characters, why would it be in any way surprising that they'd copy more than that?  I don't think it is at all.

As for Nintendo's early history, technically Pac-Man was inspired by a Sega game called Head-On, which I think is the first game in that specific genre.  Head--On and Pac-Man are pretty different, but if you look it up you can see the connection.  Devil World is certainly a game in that genre, but the moving screen that you can't control is an interesting gimmick that I don't think anything else did, so it's not just a copy.

And as for Donkey Kong, adding a jump button was one of the most important innovations ever in gaming, probably, so that one really isn't all that close.  Space Panic is a DK predecessor but DK evolved things substantially.

Balloon Fight DEFINITELY is Joust, though.  I'd think that Midway would have had a good case had they sued Nintendo over that one.  Some games in the early years of gaming were 'it's like this popular game but a bit different', but with Balloon Fight there's basically nothing different other than Balloon Trip mode, and I don't think that is enough to make it actually a different game.

Anyway, Nintendo usually wins lawsuits. I don't think they would have filed this case if they didn't think they had a very good case.

[Dark Jaguar]

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.

[Weltall]

This is your occasional reminder that Nintendo, which enjoys continued profitability due to the constant repackaging and rehashing of its intellectual properties that have been around our entire lives, and has not produced any novel intellectual property since Pokemon, inflates the prices of its games so it can better afford to unleash legal terror upon anyone who might do anything with its intellectual properties without its express permission, now spends a good chunk of money perpetuating an anti-AI astroturfing campaign, the point of which is to make reactionary plebs demand that AI is so severly limited and unavailable to other plebs, that those other plebs won't be able to use AI to make funny Mario images or maybe print some Pikachu tshirts. Once we get to that point, Nintendo will be free to outsource most of its creative processes to AI (which they 100% intend to do), without worrying that anyone else can do it, too. After all, it will be a thousand times easier for Nintendo to use AI, if your average person has little or no access to similar tools. 

Sony, Disney, and all other global IP hoarders are heavily involved, too. The reflexive anti-AI sentiment you see all over low-information parts of the internet is just good ole capitalist social deception. The talking points about "environmental impact" and "they steal from artists" is engineered by trillion-dollar corporations who just don't want to share their amazing new toys with anyone else. The same entities that spent billions trying to ban VCRs, implement awful DRM, and suing people who make fan games. All for exactly the same rea$ons.

[A Black Falcon]

I strongly support any companies trying to block AI from stealing their work and IP to either illegally train their model with copyrighted articles without permission, or allow people to make AI images with copyrighted characters.  I am 100% opposed to any of that nonsense.  Stealing work and damaging brands in the name of the new tech thing is absolutely terrible.

Additionally, claiming that "Nintendo has not produced any novel intellectual property since Pokemon" is such a comical lie that I don't even know what to say.  You do know that Pokemon released in 1996 (in Japan), yes?  And started development in 1992?  Nintendo has released a good number of major new franchises since 1996 -- Splatoon, Animal Crossing, Pikmin, Smash Bros.,  and major spinoff franchises like Mario Party, Metroid Prime, Luigi's Mansion... come on.  You know that isn't true.

Sony, Disney, and all other global IP hoarders are heavily involved, too. The reflexive anti-AI sentiment you see all over low-information parts of the internet is just good ole capitalist social deception. The talking points about "environmental impact" and "they steal from artists" is engineered by trillion-dollar corporations who just don't want to share their amazing new toys with anyone else.

No, it's from people looking at the insanely massive environmental impact AI has and how it costs dramatically more electricity than standard search engines or such.  It's not even close.

[A Black Falcon]

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.

[Weltall]

> No, it's from people looking at the insanely massive environmental impact AI has and how it costs dramatically more electricity than standard search engines or such.  It's not even close.

lmfao, like I said, people are low information and always ready to be told to grab pitchforks. Just like they will defend one set of rapacious global corporations against another set, and every single one of them feeling absolutely certain that they are too smart to fall for propaganda. 

Streaming 4k video and high quality music costs magnitudes of order more resources and electricity than AI queries, and some people do this literally 24 hours a day, on the same devices they use to post handwringing ignorance about a topic they demonstrably know little about, even on a surface level. I'm actually very pragmatic about AI and properly terrified of the real dangers, which is why I find it exasperating to see such emotional and reactionary behavior from so many allegedly progressive and open-minded individuals. 

Nintendo are patent trolls, they have a decades long history of awful anti-consumer practices, and I honestly don't care if anyone violates their IPs and makes their poor shareholders a few less billion dollars. Good catch on naming two or three of their lesser known and less-often recycled franchises that aren't quite yet 25 years of age. AI will make it easier than ever for them to pump out more and more versions of the game series we've been enjoying since toddlerhood, since AI will soon have the capability to create all the assets and do almost all the coding. Then they'll have to raise the prices of games to meet the demands of the modern economy. lo and I do mean l.

[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.