So to explain why this lawsuit is happening, we need to talk about Pocketpair’s partnership with Sony Music Entertainment Japan, and SMEJ’s subsidiary, Aniplex. And also some major context on the relationship between Nintendo and Sony (hint: they don’t like eachother at all)
Pocketpair essentially entered into a relationship with Sony, about the same kind that Gamefreak did with Nintendo way back then. At that point this is no longer the smol bean indie dev getting bullied by a big company, this is now a big company trying to take a piece out of another rival with the lawsuit being the retaliatory strike. Now as for why Sony and Nintendo don’t like eachother, this has a lot to do with the original playstation, the cd based SNES, that one. So if Nintendo never backed out of that deal (and went to go work with Philips which brought the CDi into existence), Nintendo wouldn’t be the household name it is today.
Why is this important to know? Because after that moment Sony resents Nintendo for not becoming their prize, and Nintendo resents Sony for attempting a hostile takeover action against them. Fast forward to today, and with Palworld, Sony is effectively being handed a way to get back at an old rival on a silver plater, and they’re taking the shot at knocking Nintendo down a peg. For Nintendo, they have to answer what is in organized crime terms, a blatant encroachment of their territory by Sony, and it just so happens the only avenue to do so is a patent lawsuit. Which are notoriously known for being very long, messy, and insanely risky propositions, like to the point that nobody wants to actually do them. So for Nintendo to go for a patent lawsuit against Pocketpair, they are viewing the risk of invalidating their own patent as significantly less than the damage that Sony can do to them if unanswered.
This is what the entire lawsuit is about, it’s not Nintendo vs. Pocketpair, it’s actually Nintendo vs. Sony in this lawsuit.
This all just seems so fucking petty. I’m pretty sure there have been plenty of games where you can fly using some kind of tamed creature
Its utterly pathetic by Nintendo to pull this
The most worrying part about this to me, is that if Nintendo wins this lawsuit, they might start going after other games for “similar” mechanics.
Enjoy a game where your character jumps? Oops, Mario does that.
Like swinging a sword around? Green Tunic Twink Boy has that covered.
I’m being hyperbolic of course, but once the door is open for this sort of thing, I think it will become much, much more common. Indie games are the only real threat to the big AAA companies, and the only real reason they don’t charge $200 a game, but if they can sue any indy company into bankruptcy, they’ll have no challenges to their overpriced slop.
