this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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If Nintendo goes after Pocketpair, then I want to see Atlus going after Nintendo - because on the same grounds that Palworld would be a Pokémon rip-off, Pokémon would be a rip-off of the Megami Tensei series.
I don't think that they will though. Nintendo is greedy but not stupid. It's one thing to go against a Pokémon mod for Palworld, another to go against Palworld itself.
EDIT: I'm addressing what the article says near the end. Refer to "All eyes are on Nintendo and The Pokémon Company to see if the companies take some sort of legal action against Palworld".
EDIT 2: dunno if people here noticed, but the article is only marginally about the mod. The article is mostly about Palworld being allegedly a rip-off of Pokémon. (No, it is not a rip-off, I know.) Read the article and you will see.
But that's not what's going on here? Nintendo is suing a mod creator who modded their actual IP into the game, and furthermore locked that mod through a paywall (Patreon), so, you know, profiting off of unlicensed distribution of another's intellectual property
Regarding genre, yeah, nintendo has no leg to stand on, and they know it anyway. You can't claim ownership of art styles or game mechanics, but that's neither the article nor the situation
Yeah... Letting money be involved on the modder's side is just stupid. Taking legal action is so much easier when there is money changing hands...
I'm addressing what the article says here:
I should've contextualised it better, but I kind of forgot that most people don't read the link.
Yes, I am aware of that, as the second paragraph of the very comment that you're replying shows.
They don't even have a legal case to go against Palworld anyway, unless the conspiracy-brains at Twitter are somehow correct about the devs ripping Pokemon models.
You're right that they don't. And yet this "porkyman gonna sue palword lololol" and "palword porkyman ripof lmao" discourse is everywhere in the article, as shown by the following excerpts:
People here are pretending that the article is solely about Toasted Shoes' mod being hit with a C&D or similar. It is not.
About the Twitter idiocy, I mentioned it in the palworld community, but there's no way that they ripped off Pokémon assets. People are making shit up (i.e. assuming) and those sloppy "journalists" are taking it seriously.
And even if Palworld was a monster-taming-battling game, so what? There's Digimon, Temtem, Monster Hunter Stories, Medabots, and so on and so on, and many have existed for decades. No company can own the IP to a genre. Ultimately, the people claiming that Nintendo/Game Freak will do this or that are a tiny minority, but journalists and youtubers thirsty for clicks are giving them a megaphone.
Yup. Cue to my mention of the Megami Tensei series. In Digital Devil Story you're already recruiting and raising fantastical creatures to your party, to fight alongside you, almost a decade before Pokémon started out, the game is from '87.
(Fuck, the Medabots games that you mentioned were fun. A bit rough at the edges, but customising the bots was fun.)
How can you possibly be so confident they didn't pull models from Pokemon? It's absolutely a possibility, and frankly seems impossible not to be true when you directly compare the models.
Because I did compare the models, as shown in the reply to your other comment.
Because it is obviously not true if you compare the models, if you have literally any experience of any kind with 3D models
Sounds like you haven't actually looked at any of it then apparently. There's a reason the main people speaking out about it are literally industry professionals. Even my rather meager experience with creating mods and design models for 3D printing is plenty of experience to make those comparisons myself. If you're going to act like you have any knowledge or authority on this subject you should probably have some idea what you're talking about.
"I assume that you're an ignorant" is not an argument.
If you're going to engage in the appeal to authority fallacy, at least do it properly, by naming those "industry professionals" that you are talking about.
Relevant detail: if the models were so obviously copied, the article in the OP would be called "Nintendo sues Palworld over copyright infringement".
"Chrust me" is not an argument.
Hic Rhodes, hic salta. Show it.
https://www.gamesradar.com/game-developers-arent-really-buying-the-similarities-between-palworld-and-pokemon-to-accidentally-create-a-complex-model-mesh-with-so-near-exact-proportions-is-practically-impossible/
Aaaaaaaand the source linked is a X post that doesn't even analyse the models themselves. (Of course, because even from a glance they are clearly different.)
That is not evidence dammit. Show the meshes of the models side-by-side, and point out the parts that were allegedly copied. Having roughly a similar shape is easy to justify by being inspired on the same critters, it is not evidence of copy.
There are two separate comparison videos in that article, as well as the posts from industry figures discussing the comparisons that were uploaded and how damning they are.
HOWEVER. It has come to my attention that the original poster who created those videos edited the Palworld models to make it look more damning. I was going off bad information, and I acknowledge you're correct, there no -valid- evidence Palworld directly stole models.
That said, you have to be a blind to think they aren't shameless Pokemon knockoffs. It goes far beyond mere passing similarities, most pals are assembled from chopped up Pokemon (quite thematically appropriate I suppose). Nintendo certainly thinks so too: https://www.ign.com/articles/the-pokemon-company-makes-an-official-statement-on-palworld-we-intend-to-investigate
It's crazy to assume that just because Nintendo must be perfectly fine with it just because they didn't file a lawsuit the day after the game launched.
Man, thats really funny, thats exactly what I was thinking about you when I read your comments the first time
Palworld has been in development for years which Nintendo was aware of, and could have done something about, the whole time. Both Nintendo and the company that develops and released Palworld are headquartered in Japan which doesn't really have a concept of fair use so it wouldn't exactly be a hard case for them if Palworld did infringe their IP. The mod OTOH was out for one day and Nintendo hit them with a cease and desist notice because it very clearly did infringe their IP and the mod was locked behind a paywall which makes it all the more egregious and therefore easy to get it taken down. Nintendo has a well deserved reputation as being sue happy when it comes to their IP being used in a way they don't approve of. If Nintendo thought for even a milisecond that Palworld infringed their copyrights, theyd have taken them to court a very long time ago. But the internet, being full of armchair legal experts, thinks they know copyright law better than Nintendo's cadre of lawyers. Its one of the most clear cut cases of the dunning krueger effect in a while.
Read the article? Lemmy? Hah
That's entirely missing the only reason Nintendo would actually pursue legal action. Many Palworld creatures appear to have literally identical base model proportions to Pokemon models. So exactly identical it's hard to believe it could happen once by chance, much less with over a dozen different creatures. It very strongly appears they took and modified straight Pokemon models, or at best used them as a direct reference.
No. Definitively no. The models aren't even remotely similar. Here's an example with Lycanroc vs. Direhowl, one of the contentious pairs:
It would be literally easier to create a Direhowl-like model from the scratch than to distort Lycanroc's model this way. And that is likely what they did, they clearly did not copy Lycanroc's model. Similarities are simply easier to explain by the fact that both are inspired on wolves.
Same applies to other pairs of creatures.
If you want to see how reused/copied models would look like, check this. It's from an old controversy where GameFreak lied to the players that they had to redo the models from the scratch, to justify Dexit.