and by the looks of it they had to really reach to find something to sue them for. Surprisingly to many online it wasn't the likeness of the creatures but for the similarities of capturing creatures.
Honestly when I first looked at Palworld I scratched my head why they'd chosen balls as that is quite the "pokemon" thing you'd think of. I had to look into a youtube video of how exactly it works in Palworld:
and some things stood out to me.
It's a ball, potentially the ball can be of different kind of rarities/effectiveness of capture success rate.
You throw it after a creature is weakened which affects its capture rate.
As it's attempting to capture it, it does another similar thing to Pokemon where it "shakes" which is also something quite distinct about Pokemon. The thing that's different here is that it tells you your success percentage after throwing the ball and between shakes, I don't believe Pokemon does that but there could be addons/plugins that could let you know, that is if Nintendo allowed for any customization of their games.
Now Nintendo has had quite a rep lately about using excessive "lawfare" and there's only been one lawsuit they've lost so far. People will naturally pile this lawsuit against Nintendo on top of the other aggressive ones in the past and it's continuing to give them a bad reputation in the space. I doubt they care about it and at the same time I doubt Palworld players care either, people will play irregardless. Although there's been quite a decline in Palworld players ever since it's hype early this year not affected by this lawsuit. If anything, the company behind Palworld may get quite heavy fines and would be forced to change certain in-game mechanics to continue to operate. It's all still quite fresh and I haven't had too much time to look into it in detail, just wanted to get a post out to point towards this and maybe discuss some things that may be related to my project here; Holozing.
To me I feel like it makes sense they didn't attempt to sue over the likeness of creatures as that's something really difficult to prove that they purposely copied off of Pokemon. At the same time Pokemon has been running for so many decades now and they have potentially up to 1000 different creatures that as someone who is working on a new game currently I have to go out of my way after we create a new creature to make sure it doesn't look too similar to some existing ones in games like Pokemon or others and that just feels like it shouldn't work that way.
The creatures in Holozing have had a lot of thought put behind it because we want the artwork to be something longlasting that can scale in many different mediums. Furthermore even though Holozing and I'm sure tons of other games out there are inspired by giants like Pokemon that doesn't mean that they're straight up copying intellectual property from them.
While I don't want to defend the behaviour of Nintendo nor their lawsuits in the past I kind of fail to understand why Palworld couldn't come up with a unique capturing method here. Even though there are tons of other games that use this very same mechanic and haven't gotten sued (ni no kuni, yo-kai, nexomon, monster sanctuary), just seems like a lazy oversight that was asking to leave room for Nintendo to sue them over. Creatures in and of themselves are slight alterations from real animals in the world but the way they're captured has close to nothing to do with how animals are trapped or how hunting works. At the same time one could also argue that in Palworld you hunt the creatures with guns which is more liking to how you hunt things in real life but to then use balls in such a similar manner to capture them is a bit like playing with fire.
In Zing, players will use capturing devices that shoot out lasers as the creatures in our game are holographic in nature and only players opted in to the game in the game-world can see them. On top of that, the creatures aren't captured into balls, I was personally never a fan of balls in Pokemon in the first place. Why would you want balls in your pockets or bag? That's so unorganized and hard to keep track of! Even though in Pokemon I remember the balls could be "minimized" into smaller ones as well which is another headache. Imagine losing a minimized Pokeball somewhere in the forest and that poor creature is stuck there forever like a bitcoin wallet.
The whole idea behind pokeballs can get even more confusing, according to some pokemon games it's not the balls that minimize the pokemon when captured but the pokemon all have this ability which makes the balls work?
As someone in the Reddit comments states, why do some pokemon even have an ability called minimize if they all can do it? And do they then minimize again when you press to minimize your ball?
Either way, dumb move by Palworld in my opinion.
Capturing creatures was something I personally put a lot of time into coming up with a unique way. Apart from capturing them with a device (in alpha it'll be a hand gun that shoots a laser beam), they will be transported and "entrapped" within a holo-card. I'm quite excited to show the graphics on these cards and what it'll look like when the creatures are inside and the different rarities of the cards we've created so far but I'll hold myself until after the Alpha Vial sale.
Anyway, will be interesting to see how this plays out, I do want Nintendo to lose this case cause it feels like they're over-reaching and patent laws need to be re-thought of how much they can encompass. At the same time I'm also not a big fan of Palworld and the company behind it either, the creator has been a big proponent of AI artwork and to "cheap" his way into just smashing AI generations over his games which might be why I never got the feeling that the creatures in Palworld had a lot of love/idea behind them and mostly felt like cheap versions of Pokemon or other. Nintendo is quite focused on just protecting their IP and their shareholders, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd release a game similar to Palworld after winning this lawsuit.
Either way, I'll be in my bunker working on a version hopefully better for the players than both of these.