Nintendo had registered the patents in a filing not long after Palworld’s release, setting the stage for the lawsuit.
How is that even legal? Decades after releasing something, a competitor comes along and releases their product, so you decide “now’s the time to file a patent” and you can kill the competitor. That should create a very unstable business environment as no new business can be safe when making a patent check as they can be filed after you created a product by somebody else. It makes no sense.
I was just thinking this. Japan’s patent system is so fucked up. You can do everything right, look up all relevant existing patents to make sure you’re in the clear, then a competitor ex post facto files and kills your business.
Doubt that any company would get away with this. Maybe only biggest hundred or so
This is literally what Nintendo is doing right now.
They filled this suit, and only THEN filed for a bunch of extra patents they didn’t already have in order to increase the damages they could claim from Pocket Pair for being in violation.
I already think patents for game design mechanics are idiotic an unethical, but this is absolutely insane.
Yeah, I said “get away with” and you said “they are doing” these can both be true, and I even provided the reason, too big to fail.
Japans laws regarding copyright and patents are… hazy
Nintendo is a trash company.
I don’t know why people are downvoting this post as everything stated in the article is true and unfortunate.
I didn’t downvote, but I found it quite unclear and vague.
Nintendo announced the lawsuit […] we were just about to go to Tokyo Game Show, so obviously we had to scale back a little bit and hire security guards and stuff like that."
I don’t follow the connection… Why do you need security guards in response to a lawsuit?
Just a hunch, but have you seen how rabid some nintendo -fans are? If a word of the lawsuit got out some whacko’s could try something. Ref. “Zelda-game got only 8/10? Send death threats to reviewer.” mentality.
Okay, that makes sense 😅
Well, I guess I am not informed on such details. Maybe one of the people downvoting were in my same situation. Although I guess this kind of websites expect their visitors to already know about the context.
