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189

Palworld Developer Reveals The Pokémon Patents Nintendo Claims It's Violating (kotaku.com)

submitted 1 week ago by alessandro@lemmy.ca to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca

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[–] Bassman1805@lemmy.world 148 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (19 children)

Patent No. 7545191

[Patent application date: July 30, 2024]
[Patent registration date: August 27, 2024]
Relates to a player character throwing an item at a character in the field, which triggers combat.

Patent No. 7493117

[Patent application date: February 26, 2024]
[Patent registration date: May 22, 2024]
Basically an extension of the above, relating to being able to capture Pokémon in the wild rather than just in combat like previous generations.

Patent No. 7528390

[Patent application date: March 5, 2024]
[Patent registration date: July 26, 2024]
Relating to being able to ride creatures in the open world.

Note that every single one of these patents was filed after palworld was released, and they're all awfully vague about what they actually cover.

[–] noodlejetski@lemm.ee 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/11/palworld-dev-details-the-patents-nintendo-and-the-pokemon-company-are-suing-for/

You might look at the dates Pocketpair gave there (which are correct) and think — well, they were filed after, so how can Nintendo sue using those? The answer is complicated. What Pocketpair don't say, is that these patents are from a parent patent[1] which was registered in 2021 and approved in 2023, meaning it very much does end up applying here to Palworld.

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/JP7349486B2/en

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 4 points 6 days ago

Even if we took all these patents as valid back in 2021, they'd still be fucking stupid

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION Therefore, an object of the present invention is to provide a game program, a game system, an information processing device, and an information processing method that can smoothly switch between a plurality of boarding objects in a game in which a player character boards an object and moves. [emphasis mine]

Nintendo mentions something from 2017, but I'm pretty sure World of Warcraft did something similar before 2017, possibly other MMOs as well. Reading a bit further, it sounds like automatically changing from an air mount to a ground or water mount without need for input, which Palworld doesn't do. You can glide and "auto dismount" once you hit the ground with certain pals, but that's it, you can't instantly change from a mounted pal to a different pal

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