this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
253 points (95.7% liked)
Gaming
20010 readers
557 users here now
Sub for any gaming related content!
Rules:
- 1: No spam or advertising. This basically means no linking to your own content on blogs, YouTube, Twitch, etc.
- 2: No bigotry or gatekeeping. This should be obvious, but neither of those things will be tolerated. This goes for linked content too; if the site has some heavy "anti-woke" energy, you probably shouldn't be posting it here.
- 3: No untagged game spoilers. If the game was recently released or not released at all yet, use the Spoiler tag (the little ⚠️ button) in the body text, and avoid typing spoilers in the title. It should also be avoided to openly talk about major story spoilers, even in old games.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
One extra thing a lot of articles haven't pointed out is that the mod was locked behind a patreon paywall. Sticking mods behind paywalls has been a hot subject (to put it gently) in the community for a while now. Not to rush to the defense of the most profitable franchise in the world, but yeah that's absolutely gonna get you shut down.
Paywalled mods are debatable themselves. Throwing one of the most protected IPs that’s ever existed in the mix?
Lmao, yeah. Of course this would happen.
I’m surprised it hasn’t happened to Palworld directly.
My guess is Palworld has done their homework on how to be "legally distinct" enough. It's quite a different gameplay loop, after all and Nintendo can't copyright "cute little animals that do the manual labour for the humies" otherwise things like Digimon already wouldn't exist.
This kinda flies in the face of what I heard the Palworld devs are: a rag-tag handful of nobodies on a budget of $0 making a Steam game in their free time.
I heard they didn't even use a version control system because they didn't know how to use one, they just put a copy of the code repo on a flash drive once a day, and when they ran out of drives, they went to the store to buy more.
If even a slightly less embellished version of half of what I've heard is true, I wager none of these people got anywhere near a lawyer before putting this game out.
Life has taught me a zillion times over to never buy into the story of the scrappy underdog. 9/10 it's completely fabricated where it turned out actually no they were a multiberyllionaire oil baron who had everything they needed to succeed 30 times over. Even that other 1/10 times it's still a massive stretch of the truth where the person in question was more than prepared for what was ahead of them. People naturally embellish their opposition and downplay their capacities; and underdog narratives crank that natural tendency up to 11.
You don't necessarily need a lawyer on-hand to figure out "legally distinct". Everything that Nintendo has taken down before has blatantly used the name and existing characters in both name and likeness. Even if the core idea when they started the game was "pokemon but with guns" - which I doubt - it's still a good start in the vein of "inspired by" instead of "ripping off" and I bet Nintendo knows this otherwise Palworld would have been hit just as quickly as the mod was considering this is a company who made themselves infamous for going after youtubers making let's plays of a basic racing game. They're famously litigious so they're going to be watching Pocketpair and Palworld like vultures after their next meal but either Pocketpair are more careful than they'd like the public to believe or their idea is different enough from the get-go that Nintendo will never get anything on them.