Palworld Patching Out More Gameplay Features As It Seeks To Invalidate Nintendo/Pokémon Patents
Though we haven’t discussed the lawsuit between Palword creator PocketPair and Nintendo and The Pokémon Co. so far this year, this turd of a suit is still going on. To the uninitiated, Palworld has long been described as “Pokémon with guns”. Due to that, lots of folks thought that PocketPair would eventually get sued by Nintendo and/or The Pokémon Co. for copyright infringement, while we argued the exact opposite, which is that this is the perfect idea/expression dichotomy example. A suit eventually was filed against PocketPair, but it was for a series of patents that are jointly owned by both Nintendo and The Pokémon Co., and were divisional patents filed after the release of Palworld, and appear to cover broad gameplay mechanics rather than a specific inventive mechanism in any sort of detail. Add to all of that that it was quite easy to find examples of prior art for those broad gameplay mechanics and it’s at least mildly surprising that any of this is still going on.
But the plaintiffs in this suit are very large entities compared with PocketPair, so it wasn’t entirely surprising to see the disappointing news that the latter began removing some of the supposedly offending content last year, starting with removing the “Pal Sphere” used to catch Palworld monsters via a patch. And now we’re learning that, even as PocketPair is seeking to have the patents in question invalidated (as they should!), it is removing via patch yet another Palworld gameplay feature to try to protect itself.
Writing on social media platform X earlier today, Pocketpair expressed its disappointment that such actions were required back then, before stating it was now having to make “yet another compromise” due to the lawsuit.
This ‘compromise’ arrives with Patch v0.5.5. “From this patch onward, gliding will be performed using a glider rather than with Pals,” the Palworld team wrote. “Pals in the player’s team will still provide passive buffs to gliding, but players will now need to have a glider in their inventory in order to glide.”
Pocketpair said it disputes the claims made against it, and still “[asserts] the invalidity of the patents in question”.
One of the divisional patents in question did indeed have to do with how the player travels an open world using an NPC game character, so I am assuming that’s what is going on here. But the real mild travesty in all of this is that PocketPair is busily changing how its game plays for customers that already paid money for the game purely because Nintendo and The Pokémon Co. are throwing around a couple of what sure look to me like bullshit patents.
Which is the larger point to be made here. It’s very clear these two companies are simply attempting to obstruct what they see as a direct competitor using these patents and patent law, because they know that any attempt at a copyright lawsuit would be doomed to failure.
In other words, it isn’t violations of their IP that Nintendo and The Pokémon Co. don’t like; it’s the competition.