Modder Who Put Pokémon Into Palworld Says 'Nintendo Has Come for Me'

nanoUFO@sh.itjust.worksmod to Games@sh.itjust.works – 159 points –
Modder Who Put Pokémon Into Palworld Says 'Nintendo Has Come for Me'
sea.ign.com
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Never in all of human history has there been a more appropriate time for the Surprised Pikachu Face meme.

Guy put a pokemon mod behind a pateron paywall, he was asking for it. Making a profit off nintendo's IP blatantly.

Oh that's just silly, I assumed it was a free mod.

Also apparently he ripped the assets out of a pokemon game. Not 100% sure of that but I wouldn't be surprised, he doesn't seem too smart.

Careful, or Nintendo will come for you too

Sounds to me like Palworld is safe if they're going after a mod for it

If Nintendo goes after Pocketpair, then I want to see Atlus going after Nintendo - because on the same grounds that Palworld would be a Pokémon rip-off, Pokémon would be a rip-off of the Megami Tensei series.

I don't think that they will though. Nintendo is greedy but not stupid. It's one thing to go against a Pokémon mod for Palworld, another to go against Palworld itself.

EDIT: I'm addressing what the article says near the end. Refer to "All eyes are on Nintendo and The Pokémon Company to see if the companies take some sort of legal action against Palworld".

EDIT 2: dunno if people here noticed, but the article is only marginally about the mod. The article is mostly about Palworld being allegedly a rip-off of Pokémon. (No, it is not a rip-off, I know.) Read the article and you will see.

But that's not what's going on here? Nintendo is suing a mod creator who modded their actual IP into the game, and furthermore locked that mod through a paywall (Patreon), so, you know, profiting off of unlicensed distribution of another's intellectual property

Regarding genre, yeah, nintendo has no leg to stand on, and they know it anyway. You can't claim ownership of art styles or game mechanics, but that's neither the article nor the situation

Yeah... Letting money be involved on the modder's side is just stupid. Taking legal action is so much easier when there is money changing hands...

But that’s not what’s going on here?

I'm addressing what the article says here:

All eyes are on Nintendo and The Pokémon Company to see if the companies take some sort of legal action against Palworld

I should've contextualised it better, but I kind of forgot that most people don't read the link.

Nintendo is suing a mod creator who modded their actual IP into the game, and furthermore locked that mod through a paywall (Patreon), so, you know, profiting off of unlicensed distribution of another’s intellectual property

Yes, I am aware of that, as the second paragraph of the very comment that you're replying shows.

They don't even have a legal case to go against Palworld anyway, unless the conspiracy-brains at Twitter are somehow correct about the devs ripping Pokemon models.

You're right that they don't. And yet this "porkyman gonna sue palword lololol" and "palword porkyman ripof lmao" discourse is everywhere in the article, as shown by the following excerpts:

Palworld developer Pocketpair has insisted Palworld is more akin to survival crafting games such as Ark Survival Evolved and Valheim than Pokemon, but that hasn’t stopped people from continuing to hit out at the game.

Debate has raged online about whether Nintendo or The Pokémon Company will take legal action over Palworld.

Don McGowan, who led the Pokémon Company’s legal team for almost 12 years, told Game File: “This [note: ambiguous if he refers to the controversy or PalWorld itself] looks like the usual rip off nonsense that I would see a thousand times a year when I was Chief Legal Officer of Pokémon.”

All eyes are on Nintendo and The Pokémon Company to see if the companies take some sort of legal action against Palworld,

People here are pretending that the article is solely about Toasted Shoes' mod being hit with a C&D or similar. It is not.

About the Twitter idiocy, I mentioned it in the palworld community, but there's no way that they ripped off Pokémon assets. People are making shit up (i.e. assuming) and those sloppy "journalists" are taking it seriously.

Palworld developer Pocketpair has insisted Palworld is more akin to survival crafting games such as Ark Survival Evolved and Valheim than Pokemon, but that hasn’t stopped people from continuing to hit out at the game.

And even if Palworld was a monster-taming-battling game, so what? There's Digimon, Temtem, Monster Hunter Stories, Medabots, and so on and so on, and many have existed for decades. No company can own the IP to a genre. Ultimately, the people claiming that Nintendo/Game Freak will do this or that are a tiny minority, but journalists and youtubers thirsty for clicks are giving them a megaphone.

And even if Palworld was a monster-taming-battling game, so what? There’s Digimon, Temtem, Monster Hunter Stories, Medabots, and so on and so on, and many have existed for decades.

Yup. Cue to my mention of the Megami Tensei series. In Digital Devil Story you're already recruiting and raising fantastical creatures to your party, to fight alongside you, almost a decade before Pokémon started out, the game is from '87.

(Fuck, the Medabots games that you mentioned were fun. A bit rough at the edges, but customising the bots was fun.)

Palworld has been in development for years which Nintendo was aware of, and could have done something about, the whole time. Both Nintendo and the company that develops and released Palworld are headquartered in Japan which doesn't really have a concept of fair use so it wouldn't exactly be a hard case for them if Palworld did infringe their IP. The mod OTOH was out for one day and Nintendo hit them with a cease and desist notice because it very clearly did infringe their IP and the mod was locked behind a paywall which makes it all the more egregious and therefore easy to get it taken down. Nintendo has a well deserved reputation as being sue happy when it comes to their IP being used in a way they don't approve of. If Nintendo thought for even a milisecond that Palworld infringed their copyrights, theyd have taken them to court a very long time ago. But the internet, being full of armchair legal experts, thinks they know copyright law better than Nintendo's cadre of lawyers. Its one of the most clear cut cases of the dunning krueger effect in a while.

Perhaps in a bid to avoid any potential issues with Nintendo, mod site Nexus Mods appears to be removing any Pokémon-related mods for Palworld from its site.

Nexus Mods out here making every decision possible to make me avoid them even more every year.

Oh no!

Anyway, Nexus Mods would have been sued into oblivion and what was left of it was a burning garbage pit if you had your way. It's a good thing you don't have decision making power there.

Aren't free mods under fair use? There's plenty of copyrighted material on nexusmods and even steam workshop, always has been and I hope always will be. The only issue with palworld pokemon mod was it's monetization afaik.

  1. Japan doesnt really have a concept of fair use. Nintendo can and does go after a wide variety of things that might have been considered fair use elsewhere.

  2. What this mod did would not be considered fair use anywhere else either.