Nintendo may be the happy, shiny face of gaming, but it has been on a recent run of collecting industry patents that gamers are not amused with. Many of these have been leveraged against Pokemon competitor Palworld, which has been forced to change many aspects of the game, gliding with Pals, summoning Pals with balls, because of these, lest they spend millions in court fighting against each instance.
Now? It appears that Nintendo may have hit *the button* with these patents. A new one just granted to the company has to do with summoning and battling “sub characters” and you may see where this is potentially going. Spotted by Games Fray, here’s what the new patent covers:
- (1) There must be a PC, console or other computing device and the game is stored on a drive or similar storage medium.
- (2) You can move a character in a virtual space.
- (3) You must be able to summon a character. They call it a “sub character” by which they mean it’s not the player character, but, for example, a little monster such as a Pokémon that the player character has at its disposal.
- Then the logic branches out, with items (4) and (5) being mutually exclusive scenarios, before reuniting again in item (6):
- (4) This is about summoning the “sub character” in a place where there already is another character that it will then (when instructed to do so) fight.
- (5) This alternative scenario is about summoning the “sub character” at a position where there is no other character to fight immediately.
- (6) This final step is about sending the “sub character” in a direction and then letting an automatic battle ensue with another character. It is not clear whether this is even needed if one previously executed step (4) where the “sub character” will basically be thrown at another character.
The catch here is that the game must do all of the following to be infringed, and the ramifications of this for something like Palworld, or any game with summoned characters, are unclear. But there’s clearly a reason Nintendo is going after this.
If you just summon a monster and battle it, this does not seem to be infringing. But if you summon a monster and there’s no one to fight and it just follows you around, that’s heading toward infringement. This could affect Pokemon-like games (or others depending on how they work), but it seems this is also meant to cover something more akin to Pikmin, which has this behavior.
As it stands, this is not something that is currently being leveled against Palworld despite all these other patents that have been tossed their way. That said, since this was only granted recently, we don’t know what the future holds. Pocketpair hasn’t said anything and of course Nintendo won’t comment on what any of this means publicly. But it’s the latest example of the company hunting down patents that it wants to protect for its properties when they seem like broadly applicable gameplay mechanics. Not a good look.
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