The Pokemon Company releases a statement regarding Palworld | Hacker News Reader

The Pokemon Company releases a statement regarding Palworld

corporate.pokemon.co.jp

15 pointsAgentK2034 comments

The common consensus is that this statement is a "We know, stop messaging us goddammit" with nothing implied one way or the other.

Maybe this will make the company how insanely profitable a Pokemon MMO would be. I've been dreaming of one for 20 years now.

There is no better perfect fit for an MMO than the Pokemon world.

If they were smart they would engage with the current game creators and spin this into something bigger.

I struggle to picture Nintendo teaming up with the game that has players farming and eating their own "pals". More to the point, people have been clamouring online for an MMO-style Pokemon game... hell, since the internet went mainstream. Nintendo not wanting to do the "heavy"[0] lifting of making a game like Palworld is, IMO, not why Nintendo hasn't launched one.

[0] Not an afternoon project, but also very much not out of Nintendo's wheelhouse.

I thought that they ate Pokemons considering that there are no non-Pokemon animals in the universe?

Actually, the anime even says outright that one of the Pokemon is basically extinct because it's so delicious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wrd128i8YGI

The distinction I'm looking to make is the subtlety. Palworld is objectively, dramatically more in-your-face about it. The first ad on Steam is one "Pal" eating another.

Nintendo will accept they need to have an answer to "So are all Pokemon vegan?", but will neither advertise it, nor push people to question what all the people and pokemon eat.

They have very different markets, and strive to project different images.

Another trailer is rather using Pals to manufacture firearms on an assembly line.

Its... Definitely not a Nintendo game.

there is an animation (pixalated) for slaughtering your pal.

Also you can capture humans as pals. So there is that.

Definitely not a nintendo take

I think we got an official answer to that one a while ago. https://imgur.com/ICjRaA8 (Magikarp is tasty)

The most likely outcome is that Palworld gets released on the Switch 2 eventually.

Bigger as in bigger legal win perhaps. Bigger as in hype no. That's not how media works.

Nintendo is the Apple of games world. They have their own expensive toys in their own garden and don't play with others. If they wanted to engage and make something bigger they'd engage with modders or community years ago.

They effectively are trying to kill the community-run Smash tournaments through legal.

I'm looking forward to Palworld models popping up on Models Resource or the like so I can do some comparisons on my own. That Azurobe model literally just looks like 3-4 mons thrown into a blender.

is there supposed to be any context for this post?

Look at Palworld's marketing materials and take a guess: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1623730/Palworld/

1. There's a massively succesful new game called PalWorld

2. It kiiiiinda sorta vaguely looks like Pokemon

3. Everyone and their dog is all "haha nintendo won't sue.. they won't sue, right...? right...?"

Palworld is a indie/startup game sold 8m copies in 5.5 days so far and recording second most in simultaneous player count on Steam.

There are assets in the game that are, mostly subjectively, just too close to Pokemon models that there has been internet flamewars around that topic.

"Just too close" is extremely vague, and likely isn't enough to trigger copyright infringement claims. Consider that Warhammer and Warcraft weren't similar enough to be infringing, same with Digimon and Pokemon. If this [1] isn't infringing on Pokemon, I seriously doubt Palworld is either.

1. https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNGJhOGJmZGItNjQwZS00...

Its waaay closer than digimon. Enough that you do double takes when you see many of the Palworld creatures.

It's curvatures and geometries matching too close, not the overall impression is kind of similar too close.

I think the game's massive instant success is a circumstantial evidence in its own, it's just inconceivable a lookalike indie game on Steam becomes a ~20th top selling AND second most simultaneously played game on PC ever. Granted, games like Stardew Valley and Half-Life 2 sold more over longer time periods, but never even reached the same peak player counts.

I think it's popular because of the publicity it's earned because of the alleged copyright violation, which they sure are enjoying. idgaf about the whole ordeal and I don't follow any videogame communities but I've seen it mentioned on the internet a couple times the last days. It's almost impossible not to know about it.

I don't see copyright violations. You could make an exact clone of Monopoly and as long as you don't use their assets or the text in their rules you are good to go.

The game has real-time countdowns for processing certain materials, which only progress when the game is running. That and other mechanics strongly encourage you to leave the game running even if you aren't actively playing it. (e.g. crushing rocks/hatching eggs)

I don't know if steam ignores you running a game if you're not actively interacting with it.

There are mechanics which discourage leaving the game running. Hunger, pal status effects, raids. Sure you could alt-tab and gain some advantage from that but if you just leave the game off overnight I don't think you'll benefit greatly.

It's a bit shit that eggs are so slow to hatch though. Feels like an hour would be a long time, I currently have one requiring 24 hours.

But I think later on we'll have multiple incubators and then it won't matter that much

This ^

The game is insanely popular right now, which is reason #1 its getting so much scrutiny.

The similarity is more blatant than any Pokemon-likes I've seen. By a large margin. It also has other meme worthy aspects (like the Pal-labor gun manufacturing thing) that Nintendo would absolutely not want to associate with the Pokemon brand.

Personally I'm thinking the only uncertainties is what fractions of sales will Nintendo / TPC gets out of the Pal's corpse when the bullet finally lands, like if it'll be closer to 75% or 1250%.

I don't think it looks like a ripoff. A case can easily be made that the pals are similar to animals, and both pokemon and palworld is based on real animals so it makes sense that they look similar. I see lots of pals that look nothing like pokemon.

Personally I think the game is great. I'm having a lot of fun playing it with my friends. I hope it continues being popular and that the developers get to realize it's full potential.

I don't really give a crap what Nintendo thinks about it, I don't see them offering anything similar.

People have stuck mesh models of Palworld pals inside Pokèmon to compare. It's not subjective. It's straight up theft in a number of cases.

That isn't how 3D modelling works at all. Not to mention that one of the major examples where they compared meshes admitted they scaled the models [1], so it's not even a direct 1:1 comparison.

[1]: https://twitter.com/byofrog/status/1750193272419693010

> That isn't how 3D modelling works at all.

That's a blanket statement that's meaningless.

Uniformly scaling a model, which is what the post you linked to admitted, is a perfectly fine method of comparison. If I uniformly shrink an object, that does not change the nature of the object other than to make it smaller or larger.

If I take an apple, produce a copy, shrink it, then compare it, the apple is still the same apple.

Now Palworld has changed some very minor details with some of these models but you'd really need to be committed to mental gymnastics to justify the changes between these models as anything but the weakest of attempts to dodge a lawsuit.

If it's theft, why aren't there any comparisons of vertex weights, UV maps, even texture sizes? There's only a few ways to retopologize a mesh, especially around joints, so anything there is hardly worth looking at.

I'm more than happy to concede that models could have been largely 'traced', with the original models being used as reference images. That is hardly the lift-and-shift theft that is being claimed by many online, though.

> models could have been largely 'traced'

So, when a human does that, that's an infringement.

Sure, then I'll expect to see Nintendo litigate as such. It is still not the explicit form of theft claimed by many online, where the models were just 'copied' over by the polygon.

The tweet you linked says the scaling they applied was uniform, which means this IS a direct 1:1 comparison. There's no absolute reference for size in 3D, so this is necessary no matter what.

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