It’s been advertised forever. If there was a case, Nintendo lawsuit-happy lawyers would have taken them down by now. It was never a secret their design shared aesthetic with Pokemon.
Reading the article explains that it’s not that their aesthetic is shared, it’s that some of the models are extremely similar to S/V models, beyond the likelihood of coincidence, and Nintendo plans to investigate if it’s coincidence or actual asset theft.
That was disproven several times - the guy who claimed it even admitted he’d altered Palworld’s assets to show that supposed ‘similarity’
Source? Or is this a “dude trust me”
Screenrant Article here from a day ago. It does still state that Nintendo intends to investigate, but most of the stolen/copied asset claims have been refuted or rescinded. With the main “they stole assets” person admitting they fabricated the proof because they hate how Palworld glorifies animal abuse (which is extremely ironic to me because no one had a problem when Pokémon was cockfighting for children)
No they are not.
Now that the game is out the assets can be ripped and directly compared, and so far the comparison shown by some people on the Internet have shown that many base models are nearly identical which is probablistically near impossible
Dude you are spreading misinformation.
I believe my own eyes https://twitter.com/covingtown/status/1749462735291859423. Remove the extra decoration and the underlying models are identical
Sorry to tell you but you are blind.
If you go to the account that this account uses for proof, you’ll see that the user (byofrog) admitted that they fudged the specs to make them look identical. This is not a one to one comparison
To add to that. Here’s some analysis of a professional
:
Hardly. The one they keep showing is the cat. But Pokemon didn’t invent the Cheshire cat face.
its ridiculous the number of fucking nintendo stans that are crying for nintendo to do something about Palworld.
Nintendo is the most litigeous company in the world (They fucking DCMA’d themselves for fucks sake) , If Palworld violated anything and Nintendo had actual opportunity to sue for anything… They’d have done so long ago.
They fucking DCMA’d themselves for fucks sake
Oh, I want to hear the story behind this.
they had a complete meltdown when some people got tears of the kingdom early via shipping mishaps, so went on a massive rampage of DMCA notices to take down everything mentioning it. Youtube Videos, News Articles (that contained nothing but nintendo released official screen shots/images), and their own twitter account advertising the fucking game…
Incidentally, I’ve only really found a YT video and this KYM page talking about how Nintendo DMCA’d themselves. That should’ve been the headline of any gaming outlet - https://knowyourmeme.com/news/nintendo-accidentally-copyright-strikes-itself-in-its-effort-to-combat-tears-of-the-kingdom-leaks
Fuck game freak. Like they cant even fix there own games and shit.
Right!? Palworld is just the game players have been begging for for a decade.
I wouldn’t go that far.
I can see why people who were into Ark, Valheim, Fortnite, Minecraft; however, it’s just like any other survival builder game. It just has Pokemon in it. I don’t see the hype.
It just has Pokemon in it.
That’s the point!
I knew nothing about Palworld besides the tag line ‘It’s Pokémon with guns’ and saw it was included with gamepass. I installed it and to my absolute horror in the first 5 minutes of the game it had me craft a stone pickaxe. Palworld is Ark with cuter dinosaurs, I don’t get the Pokémon comparison beyond you use balls to hold the monsters.
You can also use those same balls to capture people. And eat them.
If I gave you some of my balls, could you eat my balls?
Fuck the pokemon company
People white-knighting for Nintendo against a company that gave them an enjoyably Pokemon game.
We keep thinking about such IP lawsuits as “all or nothing” affairs because YouTube with their strike system and similar systems by other companies make it seem that way. Yet that’s not the case.
In this instance, Game Freak and Nintendo probably cannot go after palworld as a whole but battle around and then have them change singular Pal designs. That’s a super expensive thing to do and takes ages. So they’ll only do that if they risk loosing the claim to some brand ownership or other.
Which would be fine, frankly. With all the money Palworld got, they can aford to redesign some creatures. The number of them that actually look like imitations in practice is much smaller than critics make it to be.
I think people compare a lot because it’s extremely easy to think of the “originals”, even when it’s more of an inspiration than a copy-paste, like Wixen-Braixen, Lamball-Wooloo or Lovander-Salamence.
Yeah, I agree. But being evocative of an idea is not illegal, unless the design is near indistinguishable or if they used files from Pokémon in the production of the Pals. Say, how many Superman copies are there? There are multiple stories out there whose main idea is “What if Superman was bad.”
Meanwhile I see people going “Anubis is just Lucario” and I wonder why they think the Pokémon Company owns the idea of every single upright canid. It doesn’t even have spikes or anything.
IDK how US law is in this case but in Germany, all of this would evolve around the question if the game could be mistaken for a pokemon game die to those designs. It doesn’t matter how similar stuff looks as long as it’s not really plagiarism and obviously copied. So as long as they do not make it look like a pokemon game or use the pokeball or similar aesthetics, they wouldn’t risk being sued or could harm Game Freak in return. They could challenge the registered trademarks etc. which could horrendously backfire, so large corporations usually avoid going after other large corporations and try to hash stuff like this out in backrooms. Lego for example is infamous for going after small shops that import Chinese brick makers but very decidedly not going after Hasbro, Lidl and Amazon, because those companies have the means to fight Lego’s claims one by one which could lead to design rights being deleted by courts.
In this case it would probably be fought in Japan because both The Pokémon Company and Palworld’s developer Pocketpair are from Japan.
And Japanese copyright law is one of the strictest in the world
Of course, but this is what makes me wonder, if there was anything truly objectionable happening, wouldn’t they have been taken down already? It’s not like this was a surprise release.
Which would be the good ending tbh. No more plagiarism problem and we have a good game on its own
At this point it would be better for nintendo to buy palworld from the delveloper and make pokemon multiversal with palworld existing in an alternate universe.
That way they could cash in on the massive success, separate it from their actual pokemon IP all whilst appeasing fans of palworld by keeping the game alive.
You seem to think they would put any value in appeasing fans of Palworld. They’re not even interested in appeasing their own fans. If they could publicly behead Palworld for all it’s fans to see they’d do it just to send a message.
Why would Nintendo buy something that plagiarized them? They only buy independent stuff like how they did with Super Mario Bros 2
Palworld didn’t plagiarize them. This is what the kids call a nothingburger.
Obviously there are loads of similar designs, but in a way that indicates illegal asset stealing? That’s a different question, and so-called “lazy design” aping on other creations doesn’t qualify as actual theft unless it can be explicitly proven.
More grimly, it is a big corporation trying to squash an upstart competitor and suppress art. If they succeed then it is truly dystopian and a sign that we need more legal protections against overzealous copyright litigators.
I didnt k ow about this. Just read about it now. Wow. Really interesting. I want to try the Japanese super mario bros 2 now haha.
Doki Doki Panic!
From what ive read, doki doki panic was a seperate game and was reskinned to become what the western world got as super mario bros 2. Japan had a different super mario bros 2 game that was built using the original game engine.
One key difference was that in the western version mario picked up and threw enemies but in the japan game mario jumped on enemiea like in the original.
Oh no way, I didn’t know that. When you said you wanted to try the Japanese Super Mario 2, I thought you were just referring to Doki Doki Panic.
Now I really want to play the Japanese Super Mario 2 as well.
The Japanese Mario 2 was released outside of Japan on the Super Nintendo in the Super Mario All-Stars game. It’s known as “Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels” on that cartridge.
[surprised pikachu face]
Your DMCA notice is in the mail, buddy!
I mean. The guy who “broke” the story of IP “theft” in pal world admitted he made it up. Basically scaled models etc to make them look similar on purpose.
The statement sounds like PR speak for, please stop telling us about palworld, we’ve heard already.
I’m sure they have been inundated by panicked investors contacting them after reading the words, “pokemon with guns” in the news. The statement should reassure them that the company takes defending their IP seriously.
The game’s been out long enough for them to write a cease and desist if they wanted to get litigious.
Pretty much yeah. Mostly just “Yes, we know.” If they had any real chance of killing it off, they’d have done so before the game even launched. They’ll make a big show of looking into it, then grumpily admit there wasn’t technically any wrongdoing and, while they don’t support Palworld, they can’t actually stop it.
Well, Palworld developer now have $200 million more than a week ago so now they can afford lawyers as good as the Pokémon company.
It takes weeks until they see any of that Steam money from a game they just released in early access. Though a bank might likely give them a hefty loan now for a proper defense. But let‘s not pretend Japan copyright and trademark laws are lenient or reasonable and Nintendo is basically a national treasure. If Pocketpair was based in any other country it would be different but here we really do not know how it could go.
Imagine thinking steam is their only revenue.
Do I need to play it now or never? I have a feeling this FOMO is driving some of their current engagement.
deleted by creator
It’s like when Rust first came out but with less dong. Think I’ll pass.
What if future updates double or even triple the dong? Any chance you’d reconsider then?
Chillet is basically one giant weiner you can ride around the world while blasting your pals from afar.
I think you may not be playing the game correctly.
They just waiting until it evolves into Chilltrio
I decided that I will check it out when it’s fully released (if/whenever that happened).
Well seeing as their other game, Craftopia, is still in early access, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
And considering the treck record of the company (BOTW and Hollow Knight ripped off) I half expect the Palworld devs to either sell off the project or to run off with the money. Did I mention the company lead also runs a scam business (cryptocurrency)?
Oh man time to bring out the popcorn.
The Palworld fanboys are already trying to mental gymnastics their way out of this “It’s just PR! Gamefreak is bluffing!!!1”
If Nintendo would invest the money they pump in DMCA takedowns and lawyers in their games instead,
then perhaps they would have a chance to make something equally good as Palworld.Who in Palworld even allowed release of the game with certain assets that look so much like Pokémon? I mean, it doesn’t even need that.
The author of the article doubts Nintendo will do anything, but they certainly will.
Someone with knowledge actually analysed a few models and ended up making this statement too. With Japans stricter copyright laws this might become a problem for Pocketpair
Regardless, considering the Companies history with Craftopia and a few other games, we shouldn’t get our hopes up anyways. This company has a habit of plagiarising relatively popular games (BOTW, Hollow Knight) then never delivering a fully fleshed out product.
Did they say how they analyzed the models? Because looking at the silhouette and other similarities isn’t enough to prove plagiarism when it comes to 3d models.
What you have to do is open up both the original and the suspected copy models and select a couple of similar vertices (the points that give the model geometry) and compare the position down to the decimal place. If they are even a little off, then it isn’t a copy.
The “analysis” here was a guy assuming a video he watched was truthful. Spoiler, it wasn’t. The original video comparing assets was confirmed to have faked its analysis.
I would upload the dudes files but they’re MP4. Any good way to upload those to Lemmy? Or a good third party service you recommend I can link here?
