Topic: Nintendo Lawsuit's by Palworld

Yokai Watch was a 3DS exclusive. Ntdo was the only platform holder making money from sales of that game at that time.

Level 5 would have been entirely deferential to Ntdo and TPC as a 3DS exclusive game. No doubt Nintendo had conversations with Level 5 before YW’s launch. Nintendo was in a position of influence with Level 5. They likely influenced its very development and marketing.

Thus YW is not a good comparison to a developer that flew under Nintendo’s radar, literally flew under their radar right next door until the moment it went viral in a shocking way to Nintendo. ‘Pokémon with guns’ was always going to be in Nintendo’s black book no matter the legalities. Absolutely.

@kkslider5552000 It can negatively affect human beings, it's just not as overt. If Palworld steals Pokemon's designs, that could mean Pokemon makes less money. Less money means that Game Freak/TPC may need to let some staff go, and that could cause the affected staff to have trouble feeding their families. And in a legal system, these kinds of laws need to be applied generally. You can't just apply laws differently based on how big the involved parties are, you can't have a fair, just, and orderly society that way. If you're upset about Game Freak's lack of effort and polish, you want them to face consequences on that basis, not in some unrelated matter that isn't their fault.

@Bolt_Strike how many Pals actually look like Poke knockoffs? I didn’t see more than a handful that looked like parody. The rest looked similar by virtue of art-style. So TPC has how many Pokémon designs? I don’t think anyone’s ‘stolen’ anything. A few knockoffs of not even the most popular Pokémon is not going to see Game Freak staff out of the building.

@NinChocolate Looking through the list, about half of them look like knockoffs. They seem to just slip under the radar of being copy/paste jobs by mishmashing elements of existing Pokemon together, but in general they're recycling design elements of specific Pokemon that goes beyond just artstyle similarities.

In what reality does this even happen? I think every mainline Pokemon on Switch sold double or more of the entire Wii U console, the console cycle where Nintendo still didn't cut jobs because Iwata took a pay cut.

I mean, I am, but I would say this about most scenarios like this.

@Bolt_Strike I guess to me the Pals don’t look remarkable. I’d wager they didn’t look remarkable to Nintendo before the game lit up. I think a lot of artists are making an endless amount of Pokémon adjacent creature designs and always will be. I guess I don’t think much of it.

I feel like Nintendo is throwing their weight around in this case. Maybe that’s shrewd to some. I think a small group got the top of the food chain sweating. Intriguing.

@NinChocolate Even then, again Persona. Nintendo makes nothing off of Persona and yet it's still a popular series that is allowed to exist. Persona was Sony's thing for far longer than Palworld. The first Persona game to be brought to switch was Persona 4 Golden back when it got the PC port. Until then, Persona 1 to Persona 5 were Playstation exclusive games.

@VoidofLight I don’t know much about that game but I’ll take your word for it.

@kkslider5552000 Maybe not in this specific scenario, but that could easily happen for other developers that are less altruistic than Iwata (that pay cut he took during the Wii U era is the exception, not the norm among CEOs, most CEOs are more willing to throw their underlings under the bus to save their own skins). The whole point of a legal justice system is to apply law equally to everyone maintain order. If you start making exceptions to one group or another based on innate differences like the size of the company, that group gains unfair power over others and becomes difficult to keep in check. In other words, those smaller companies you're trying to empower will become just as arrogant as Game Freak and TPC by treating them favorably based on their size.

@NinChocolate Persona is a monster collecting game, but the monsters are tools that you fuse into stronger monsters. Mostly based off of biblical figures. Digimon is another big monster collecting franchise that's been exclusive to Playstation before coming to Nintendo platforms. Bandai never got sued for making Digimon.

The point is that Nintendo isn't doing this to shut a company down because they want to be the only monster collecting game. If they wanted that, then they would've tried this years ago with multiple other franchises that were massively popular. Instead they didn't. The only reason they're doing it with Palworld is because Palworld genuinely copies game mechanics from Pokemon and Ark Survival Evolved. Mainly rooted in the CEO of Pocketpair's beliefs about not wanting to innovate with game dev, and wanting to instead make what's trendy.

@VoidofLight I can accept all that, for sure. I will also accept that TPC wants revenge on a business that they feel straddled the line so closely that it was to them (and maybe everyone else) an open insult to their business, and from a dev in their own city no less.

I’ve no doubt that they vented the insult to Ntdo and asked them to put their legal weight into finding some fault. And Ntdo is gonna listen to TPC.