Pocketpair, developers of Palworld, have put up a statement on the new lawsuit that has been filed against them from Nintendo and The Pokemon Company.
Here's the statement in full:
Yesterday, a lawsuit was filed against our company for patent infringement.
We have received notice of this lawsuit and will begin the appropriate legal proceedings and investigations into the claims of patent infringement.
At this moment, we are unaware of the specific patents we are accused of infringing upon, and we have not been notified of such details.
Pocketpair is a small indie game company based in Tokyo. Our goal as a company has always been to create fun games. We will continue to pursue this goal because we know that our games bring joy to millions of gamers around the world. Palworld was a surprise success this year, both for gamers and for us. We were blown away by the amazing response to the game and have been working hard to make it even better for our fans. We will continue improving Palworld and strive to create a game that our fans can be proud of.
It is truly unfortunate that we will be forced to allocate significant time to matters unrelated to game development due to this lawsuit. However, we will do our utmost for our fans, and to ensure that indie game developers are not hindered or discouraged from pursuing their creative ideas.
We apologize to our fans and supporters for any worry or discomfort that this news has caused.
As always, thank you for your continued support of Palworld and Pocketpair.
When it comes to what patent infringement Nintendo / Pokemon could be going after Pocketpair for, well, Nintendo actually have quite a number of patents that are for some very specific game mechanics. Which could be really problematic not just for Pocketpair, but all game developers looking to do anything similar.
Take for example this patent (approved in Japan, pending in the USA), that covers the feature of capturing creatures by throwing an object and sending out a character (like a Pokemon) to engage in combat.
Remember, this is not about copyright infringement, so they're not specifically going after any of the creature designs, but it's about the patents.
This is going to be a legal fight to remember. One perhaps for the history books.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: tmtvlAnyway, my expectation is that Nintendo isn't going to take it all the way to court, they're probably aiming at an out-of-court settlement and if that doesn't happen they'll probably back off.That sadly seems likely and is of course the classic strategy of patent trolls.
The patent mentioned above is the classic case of a "Moby Dick Support Device" https://seegras.discordia.ch/Blog/the-moby-dick-support-device/
On an unrelated note, "game mechanics" and -rules are explicitly not copyrightable.
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