MagicHats' Corner

Nintendo, Palworld, and Leaks Oh My!

Thought of the Day: Palworld, Nintendo, and Patent trolling - Thursday September 19th, 2024

A big thing going around on the few other social media websites i'm on today is how Nintendo / Game freak has announced a lawsuit against the Palworld developers over Palworld. not for copyright infringement but over Patent rights for Patents they filed for After Palworld's release.

It's interesting but also a funny case. Funny in "ya know I really do think Nintendo should go after them for the copyright and those developers have been doing some scummy business practices, but this kind of patent trolling is objectively kind of worse to try to slip under the door and that I hope palworld in this instance wins because the consequences for the rest of the game industry could be bad if Nintendo gets away with it".

Like it feels like legal copyright / patent grifting, which is real bad. Much like how the original flappy bird developer lost the copyright to their own game because they didn't renew it and a scummy dev group decided once it was up to just take it and then use it for a much worse IP design, as far as I understand it Nintendo's not suing for the copyright but over undisclosed gameplay patents that it had filed after the release of palworld. Like trying to monopolize the basic gameplay loop itself is bad on nintendo's part and is actively kind of anti-competitive.

Tumblr Post 1 - Sunday October 13th, 2024

The Copyright Trolling that Nintendo was doing on Palworld makes so much more sense now, knowing some of the things that were just leaked with regards to upcoming Pokemon games.

Not to defend Palworld, Palworld is scummy, but it makes more sense if they were planning to release an online multiplayer game to try to kneecap the competition now if Palworld supposedly runs too close to that game (coincidentally or not).

#Like I don't think the Palworld devs had a guy inside nintendo thefting patents but like#If nintendo was slowly hacking away at something similar and then Palworld just goes viral before they launch their game #makes more sense from a tactical standpoint to allege theft from the start to prevent a competitor overtaking them #I will refrain from discussing the Teraleak at large because apparently the scope is huge (like stuff abt switch 2 huge) #and at most I might just be looking at the cutting room floor content that came out #since we haven't had anything interesting to look at since someone found a convention demo of Gold / Silver for cut pokemon

Tumblr Post 2 - Monday October 14th, 2024

Yeah I’ve been thinking more on that giant game freak Tera leak

And while I have only been looking at the dug up old beta content and not the spoilers for the anime or any of the games moving forward outside of the general “this game is this type that game is that type” talk

It’s terrible that so many people got doxxed because they leaked that.

And what’s worse is that while they haven’t leaked upcoming game source codes, boasting that they even have the source code for that game at all might result in the next gen game after the legends game getting scrapped entirely and it being a 5-10 year wait for the new new generation game. Not to mention worsening trust between game freak as a company and the consumer base.

#the one thing that I was thinking about is the fact that Pokemon concept art books would be super popular #and it’s wild that they never went that route given that some of the other IPs like Splatoon and Zelda do that

Today's Thought's, Tuesday October 15th, 2024

So, having Looked at the stuff I've got thoughts. Lots of thoughts.

The timeline is such that the initial data breach which resulted of this makes this all look rather serendipitous Mostly because it's

I've looked a little into the upcoming games, only the basic blurbs and nothing too indepth outside of the alarming statement of "hey we got the source code for these games they're playable".

and while i've got thoughts on those (namely i'm trying to wrap my head around what a splatoon-like pokemon game would look like; is it splatoon but with pokemon or something that's got the same kind of freshness that splatoon has or somethin else), knowing that either one or two of the games are open world online multiplayer, the patents that Nintendo was trying to troll out of Palworld really lines up if you consider some of the leaked stuff.

Some of this in hindsight is pretty much a case of "well if they did more artbooks and were more transparent about cutting room floor stuff leaks like these wouldn't be as likely to happen", but a big part of the issue is that Gamefreak runs it like the Disney Vault because as was seen in the cutting room floor content that gout out, they sit on a lot of things because they could be handy later. A surprising amount of later-game pokemon designs were made much earlier than anticipated.

If they ever were to go that route like other game IP's have done (notably Zelda, Kirby, and Mario have all also released art books of cutting room floor design and those have sold very well)

It is still not great that this is at the cost of a lot of leaked private information that is damaging to a great many people. It's still interesting to think about if you look at it through this particular lense, that while I seriously don't think that Nintendo thought that there was a palworld dev working on the inside, or that that ever happened, that perhaps if they were woirking on something conceptually similar and usually banked on being the first to the table for their genre to see Palworld come out and want to tackle that to get ahead of the potential leaks and whether or not other competing developers had access to that sort of thing and were using it.

It still rankles of patent trolling to keep others from using what Gamefreak wants to use to ensure that they're still first to the table (reasonably speaking; technically Skyrim and / or Zelda breath of the wild were first to the open world table but I digress). If it were to be used in upcoming games any better than seen in sword / shield and Scarlet / Violet the upcoming games could be Great.

It's also weirdly vindicating seeing that it turns out that genwunners were in fact kind of the worst thing to happen for the company in terms of progress and doing new things because apparently Gen 5 got canned so hard that all consequential games were given curse of Kanto pokemon out of fear that the offices might get bombed like what happened over an anime, and a similar situation for keeping ash in the cartoon for so long even though it was getting to the point of obvious series decay by the time they got around to actually getting Ash out of the Anime. At this conjecture the company needs to pull More gen 5's in terms of like, going full slate clean new pokemon only pokedexes. Even if it's unpopular we're hitting the wall of how well you can spice up new pokemon games without doing that more often.