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One extra thing a lot of articles haven’t pointed out is that the mod was locked behind a patreon paywall. Sticking mods behind paywalls has been a hot subject (to put it gently) in the community for a while now. Not to rush to the defense of the most profitable franchise in the world, but yeah that’s absolutely gonna get you shut down.
Paywalled mods are debatable themselves. Throwing one of the most protected IPs that’s ever existed in the mix?
Lmao, yeah. Of course this would happen.
I’m surprised it hasn’t happened to Palworld directly.
My guess is Palworld has done their homework on how to be “legally distinct” enough. It’s quite a different gameplay loop, after all and Nintendo can’t copyright “cute little animals that do the manual labour for the humies” otherwise things like Digimon already wouldn’t exist.
This kinda flies in the face of what I heard the Palworld devs are: a rag-tag handful of nobodies on a budget of $0 making a Steam game in their free time.
I heard they didn’t even use a version control system because they didn’t know how to use one, they just put a copy of the code repo on a flash drive once a day, and when they ran out of drives, they went to the store to buy more.
If even a slightly less embellished version of half of what I’ve heard is true, I wager none of these people got anywhere near a lawyer before putting this game out.
Life has taught me a zillion times over to never buy into the story of the scrappy underdog. 9/10 it’s completely fabricated where it turned out actually no they were a multiberyllionaire oil baron who had everything they needed to succeed 30 times over. Even that other 1/10 times it’s still a massive stretch of the truth where the person in question was more than prepared for what was ahead of them. People naturally embellish their opposition and downplay their capacities; and underdog narratives crank that natural tendency up to 11.
You don’t necessarily need a lawyer on-hand to figure out “legally distinct”. Everything that Nintendo has taken down before has blatantly used the name and existing characters in both name and likeness. Even if the core idea when they started the game was “pokemon but with guns” - which I doubt - it’s still a good start in the vein of “inspired by” instead of “ripping off” and I bet Nintendo knows this otherwise Palworld would have been hit just as quickly as the mod was considering this is a company who made themselves infamous for going after youtubers making let’s plays of a basic racing game. They’re famously litigious so they’re going to be watching Pocketpair and Palworld like vultures after their next meal but either Pocketpair are more careful than they’d like the public to believe or their idea is different enough from the get-go that Nintendo will never get anything on them.
- Posts “Surprised Picachu face” image
- Gets DMCA’ed by Nintendo lawyers
try a disappointed sparkit
I’m so behind on Pokemon that I genuinely can’t tell if this is a Pokemon or a Pal.
Issa pal
As someone with minimal pokemon knowledge, only played two due to being older and not having Nintendo consoles really, I thought this game was a spin off till I realized no big pokemon or Nintendo logo anywhere. They must have threaded the needle to avoid that copyright infringment.
They’ve done a great job and nailing the art style modern Pokemon games should have had, while being distinct enough to avoid any serious chances of a lawsuit winning.
Modders will be the ones running afoul of Nintendos lawyers.
As long as the mods are free (can’t monetize on IP) most mods should be legally safe from copyright. But I’m not a lawyer so not sure how this works.
Nah, once you start distributing the mod, be it free or not, it’s copyright infringement. They can’t sue you for the profits made, but they can still force you to take it down and pay reparations for any potential damage to their IP, as stupid as that may sound.
So the pokemon mod for minecraft can be sued and taken down?
Nintendo is going to be watching this motherfucker till the end of time
Just ask Gary Bowser…
That poor guy got screwed. His life is forever changed because of a fucking Switch mod
I don’t get how this is news, it’s the most predictable, obvious outcome.
Nintendo literally DMCA’s hentai artists bro.
One of these days I want to see it go to court just so that the judge and jury has to discuss the legitimacy of sexualized cartoon animals, with the defence forced to keep a straight face as they try to explain why a person banging a goodra with giant jugs in a wedding dress isn’t infringing copyright. Just a bunch of professional adults in a room forced to dance around the elephant in the room because it’s irrelevant to the case.
Slow news day for games journalism and writers trying to justify their paychecks. Plus, I’d imagine it helps those who were running bets not on if Nintendo would crush it, but how long before they did.
They were so busy thinking to NintenDO the mod. Instead they should have been thinking NintenDONT break copyright laws.
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Nah, that one’s legit. Nintendo does a lot of fucked up claims, but this is a 1 to 1 ripoff of their IP and models.
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The most based of the instances
And a broken clock is right twice a day. Sure this one is legit, it’s still Nintendo’s legal department. Just because they’re right this time doesn’t change anything.
The mod or Palworld?
The mod. Palworld should be distinct enough in gameplay and monster design that any lawsuit would fail.
I saw some comparisons of unrigged models from pal world overlayed with Pokemon models and they had nearly the exact same pose and proportions with some geometry tweaked. The chances of them matching up that closely by chance is practically impossible, and there were several examples. One rip off model is not enough to win a case, but if there’s a lot of them I think there’s a pretty good case that can be built. Gameplay and concept wise, I don’t think there’s a case, but with the model infringement there may be enough to show a deliberate pattern of ripping their model files.
EDIT: Found the post: https://twitter.com/covingtown/status/1749462735291859423
The silhouettes minus the the extra details are nearly identical.
Yes
Tbf this guy was sticking his mod behind a paywall. Scumbag
Wow… didn’t see that coming… /s
Unfortunately that sounds like a clear cut case. Iirc they have copyright to the creatures themselves, and that case is very straightforward to prove.
This was expected, concidering it’s using copyrighted characters
That’s not even it. It’s because it was paywalled. The Minecraft Pokemon mod has stuck around.
Should have done what that terrible zelda unity port did; have the project free to download with a patreon on the side.
That was fast.
Yeah turns out putting it behind a paywall pisses of Nintendo lmao.
Yeah you can’t make money off of copyrighted intellectual property without seeing some lawyers.
