• littlecolt@lemm.ee
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    4 hours ago

    I can read the room here. I know this will be an unpopular opinion, and I want to preface this with a big “fuck Nintendo” and particularly their legal team.

    That said, fuck Palworld, too. They are absolutely just straight up copying Nintendo/The Pokemon Company’s designs. It’s blatant. It’s AI bros making money by copying Pokemon designs, plain and simple. Palworld would not have caused the stir it did if not for the blatant “It’s Pokemon with guns!” angle.

    So, while Nintendo can normally go suck the biggest of dicks when they swing around their lawsuit arms, this time I think they fully have every right to go after these guys, I don’t care how much they say they’re gonna fight the big bad mega company “for the fans and for indie devs everywhere” lol man, great statement. Guaranteed to get the base riled up.

    Thank you for reading, you may downvote.

    • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 hours ago

      I just don’t believe in copyright, IP patents or having fences on human culture.

      So even if they straight up put Pikachu in their game I think they have the moral right to do so. If they can make a good game with Pikachu in it, who is Nintendo to private humanity from that piece of culture?

      My statement is about morality. What’s legal or not is another matter.

      • kyle@lemm.ee
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        4 hours ago

        I mean…artists should be paid for their work right? Fuck Nintendo, but that same logic could be applied to anyone. I’d be pissed if someone just straight up lifted my designs and resold it.

      • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        I’m not extremely against all of copyright because I believe artists should have some protections (though the law sucks at this), but I also believe that once something becomes a decades-old billion-dollar franchise, non-identical imitation should be fair game. Can you imagine what would happen if companies could simply say that they own whole genres?

    • racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 hours ago

      I love how you wrote all this, and are completely missing the mark. Nintendo is filing a lawsuit claiming that the palworld devs violated their patents, not their copyrights.

      Anything palworld ‘copied’ from pokémon is either japanese lore, or from older games. This is not a copyright suit. If a copyright suit were possible, Nintendo would have brought it waaaay earlier. I’m wondering which patents Nintendo has that were supposedly violated.

      I love how there’s this entire discussion here about copyright etc… while that’s not even what this is about.

      • CatLikeLemming@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        3 hours ago

        I bet Nintendo has a lot of patent violations to choose from. They have a patent on such bangers as, rephrased from legal speech to human speech: “An air mount automatically turning into a ground mount upon landing” Source

        According to Nintendo, if I understand this correctly, they have the sole legal right to make a bird mount that can also sprint on the ground if needed, because that sure was a special idea.

    • ZeroHora@lemmy.ml
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      4 hours ago

      They are also making a copycat game “inspired” by hollow knight, obviously doing for the indie devs out there.

        • MoogleMaestro@lemmy.zip
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          3 hours ago

          If we allow this to continue, we will end up with more content for players to enjoy.

          More slop that’s copy and pasted from other games?

          No, I don’t think I want that, thanks though.

        • ZeroHora@lemmy.ml
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          3 hours ago

          Yeah of course, they are only going to ripoff others indie devs out there for the players to enjoy.

                • ZeroHora@lemmy.ml
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                  57 minutes ago

                  Or jigsaw puzzle, the thing is there’s nothing 100% original and people always get inspired by others.

                  Things is starting to get strange when a company only makes games there have the same aesthetic of a more famous game.

                  Craftopia This isn’t Genshin is Craftopia

                  Never Grave This isn’t Hollow Knight is Never Grave

                  Metroidvania and the Open World of Genshin is nothing new, Genshin share a lot of similarities with BOTW and have the combat animation similar to Nier:Automata but this company tried a lot to differentiate only in the mechanics of the game while coping the aesthetics.

                  Fuck Nintendo and miHoYo but come on don’t go and tried to emulate the aesthetic of a indie developer and than say “fight Nintendo lawsuit on behalf of fans and indie developers”.

                • Buttons@programming.dev
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                  2 hours ago

                  Good call, the shape arranging mechanic existing in board game form before Tetris, and the “challenge approaching from the top of the screen” thing was a staple of many many Atari and arcade games.

                  • M0oP0o@mander.xyz
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                    2 hours ago

                    Nothing is ever completely new and that should not stop people making things.

    • Furbag@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      I’m not going to downvote you, but, I disagree. Nintendo might have had a leg to stand on if they tried to say Palworld infringed on their Pokemon intellectual property and/or copyright, especially after the mesh controversy, but they didn’t attack them on that. They’re going after Pocketpair for patent infringement on a so-far undisclosed patent. Probably a game mechanic of some sort. Pokemon did not invent the monster collecting and/or battling genre. Dragon Quest predates it by a good margin.

      I’d like to see the patent they claim to have. In what way might Palworld be infringing upon their patent that another similar game, like say TemTem for instance, is not? I hate the idea that a fun game mechanic can be patented and locked down by one company for up to 20 years.

      Palworld would not have caused the stir it did if not for the blatant “It’s Pokemon with guns!” angle.

      This was 100% a fan reaction to the trailer, and not an official stance by the developers at all. That’s obviously what they were going for, but they stopped long before outright saying it out loud and let the consumer make their own inferences.

      They have every right to go after them, but I really hope they lose this one. Nintendo doesn’t deserve to have a monopoly on fun creature collecting games.

      • littlecolt@lemm.ee
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        1 hour ago

        Absolutely. I’m looking at getting Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince soon. I doubt anyone calls it a Pokemon copycat, too.

    • Buttons@programming.dev
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      3 hours ago

      They didn’t copy Pokemon, they created new content that is similar to Pokemon.

      Do you believe it is wrong to create new content that is very similar to existing content that people enjoy?

      Is it wrong for Pocket Pair (Palworld’s creator) to create new content that is similar to existing Pokemon? Is it wrong for GameFreak to create new content that is similar to existing Pokemon? Morally speaking, why are the answers to those questions different?

      • littlecolt@lemm.ee
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        3 hours ago

        If you can’t see how blatant it is, I don’t know what to tell you. You can be all “it’s just SIMILAR wink wink” all you want. Similar is a fucking understatement.

        • Buttons@programming.dev
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          3 hours ago

          Okay. You don’t like the word “similar” I guess. What word would you use?

          It is certainly not the same.

    • SSJMarx@lemm.ee
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      3 hours ago

      I think you could be right, but it depends on the details Nintendo comes out with. I remember people were saying that they thought certain Palworld monsters had been ripped from the Pokemon games and recolored - if Nintendo can demonstrate that, then that’s a slam dunk for them.

      But if it’s just creature designs and collecting them, then I just don’t think that “a cute monkey with green fur” is a novel enough concept to be defensible against someone else doing something similar.