“We’re looking into it and feeling litigious.”
Feeling cute, might litigate later, idk
Nothing will come of it. Nintendo is basically THE most litigious game company in the world. There is no way Nintendo didn’t know about Palworld before the release date. The original trailer 3 years ago was way more than enough of they wanted to do anything. The Pal models in that trailer were even closer to various Pokemon than what is in the actual release. If they thought they had a case for it, they would have had a better case back then.
Japan does not have fair use, it’s one of the main reasons Nintendo is so litigious and successful at it. Unlike many of their lawsuits however, the Palworld developers are in Japan as well, so it wouldn’t even be an international lawsuit. If Nintendo thought they had a case like the armchair experts seem to think, they would have been all over this already.
This is just an official statement so ignorant people stop flooding them with stupidity because they hadn’t said anything.
If the game has to be shut down because of The Pokémon Company, Nintendo or Game freak, what will happen to people who bought the game? I can see that the company may have to refund them but they can bankrupt I guess
Twenty years ago, it wAs just a case of “gather up your current stock from sale and destroy it”. The gaming world is no stranger to these sorts of rights controversies - the first one that springs to mind is Formula 1 '97 where Bizarre Creations used Jacques Villeneuve’s likeness without permission, and the FIA logos were used in the boxart without authorisation from the FIA themselves. Psygnosis were ordered to pull all stock from sale - and they reissued a CD with WILLIAMS DRIVERONE as Damon Hill’s oppo and cleared the box of any logos that they didn’t have rights to.
These days, good question. I would imagine that any DRM free copy is still yours, but online play could be curtailed (problematic in a game like PalWorld), or worse still - your platform of choice could pull the authentication aspect of the game and prevent you from launching it, and fuck you in particular because it’ll be in the T&C’s that it’s a you problem and not a vendor problem.
Most likely though, nothing. The Pokémon Company and Nintendo aren’t exactly shy of litigation, and PalWorld has had it’s fair share of coverage to date. If they were going to fuck it over, I’m sure they would have done it by now.
