How difficult would it be to sidestep the Palworld lawsuit, anyway?
(boundingintocomics.com)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (16)
sorted by:
I mean, you could sidestep the similarities with Pokemon quite efficiently by introducing a mechanism that 'immobilizes or captures' the targeted creature, and only afterwards, when the immobilization/capture has been successful, you approach the creature and lock them in a 'magical/technological' container that greatly reduces their size.
Releasing the creature for subsequent combat can also be slightly altered. Instead of carrying around different 'Pokeball'-style devices, you carry around a Ghostbusters-style containment unit that holds various creatures, which you release through whatever stylistic flourish you deem necessary for your game.
You could even use a futuristic bazooka to blast creatures at opponents.
You are missing the point entirely. This lawsuit is impossible to avoid because these patents were made after Palworld was created, specifically to destroy Palworld. Nintendo would have made different patents if Palworld was different. Nintendo is already changing the patents they are suing over, mid-lawsuit, as Palworld makes changes to avoid infringing on the previous version of the patents. Nintendo is simply attempting to crush a competitor with bad-faith legal action and must be delivered a humiliating defeat not merely in the legal field but in the field of public perception as well. We must mock them.
Does prior art not exist anymore?
That's what the patent just got rejected over, there's plenty of prior art to point to that makes these patents worthless. However, Nintendo has infinite money, time, and lawyers to file horseshit patents and sue people with. They can keep filing losing lawsuits forever and impose significant legal cost to making products that compete with Nintendo. Even if they lose every single one, they can still force small companies to spend way too much money on lawyers and potentially drive them bankrupt. That is why Nintendo has to be punished for doing this, beyond the simple cost of the lawsuit.
With the continued popularity of the Switch as the normie console du jour. That isn't likely to happen.
There are dozens of creature capture games out there that do completely unique capture mechanics that I think are largely better than Pokemon outright.
The Digimon Story games literally just fill a "Scan" bar everytime you encounter a wild Mon, that once you have enough data you can just summon your own version (or wait until 200% for better stats), with the higher tier ones giving progressively smaller % (babies give like 50% per while Champions are down to 15%).
One of my favorites and arguably the best creature capture game on the market, and I will fight people on it, Monster Sanctuary just has egg drops as a chance on conclusion of every battle of any monster you fought. But every battle has a "score" and Star system based on how well you did (time, damage taken, debuffs used) with 5/6 Stars guaranteeing an egg. Even every boss drops their own egg if you can 5 Star them, meaning with skill you can use them immediately after beating.
Both of which just hang out in the world with you full time, because they don't need the complexity of "magical storage devices" to keep their world building intact. Heck even Pokemon stopped doing that forever ago in its own games, and the Pokeballs are just archaic throwbacks to early games where Pokemon weren't hanging around doing things in every town.
Coromon on android is literally just Pokémon Emerald with disks instead of balls. Nintendo is oddly petty, as if Palworld or any of those other games actually hurt overall sales of Pokémon.
Yeah Coromon is probably the most direct clone, and it works pretty well if that's what you want. Heck the "alternative evolution" idea is one I think more games should copy, same with Shiny being a sliding scale of strength instead of an absurd rarity cosmetic.
But as we learned from the Switch emulation or the AM2R situation, they seem to throw their weight around when its directly harming them instead of aggressively like Disney would. They let the Switch emulators piss on their feet for years until people started spamming them with Tears of the Kingdom videos before its release and it absolutely lost them sales.
I am 100% certain they wouldn't have cared about Palworld if people didn't run that campaign of "Pokemon sucks compared to this!" loud enough that they couldn't ignore it.
Not that that justifies their actions in a lot of these cases, but people really ignore how much they provoke it.
Palworld is more like Ark than Pokémon other than the creature designs. Pokémon isnt a survival game, even Arceus or whatever wasnt.
Never liked Digimon.
Then you are missing out.