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Never in all of human history has there been a more appropriate time for the Surprised Pikachu Face meme.
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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.
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.)
How can you possibly be so confident they didn't pull models from Pokemon? It's absolutely a possibility, and frankly seems impossible not to be true when you directly compare the models.
Because I did compare the models, as shown in the reply to your other comment.
Because it is obviously not true if you compare the models, if you have literally any experience of any kind with 3D models
Sounds like you haven't actually looked at any of it then apparently. There's a reason the main people speaking out about it are literally industry professionals. Even my rather meager experience with creating mods and design models for 3D printing is plenty of experience to make those comparisons myself. If you're going to act like you have any knowledge or authority on this subject you should probably have some idea what you're talking about.
Sounds like you haven’t actually looked at any of it then apparently.
"I assume that you're an ignorant" is not an argument.
There’s a reason the main people speaking out about it are literally industry professionals.
If you're going to engage in the appeal to authority fallacy, at least do it properly, by naming those "industry professionals" that you are talking about.
Relevant detail: if the models were so obviously copied, the article in the OP would be called "Nintendo sues Palworld over copyright infringement".
Even my rather meager experience with creating mods and design models for 3D printing is plenty of experience to make those comparisons myself.
"Chrust me" is not an argument.
Hic Rhodes, hic salta. Show it.
Aaaaaaaand the source linked is a X post that doesn't even analyse the models themselves. (Of course, because even from a glance they are clearly different.)
That is not evidence dammit. Show the meshes of the models side-by-side, and point out the parts that were allegedly copied. Having roughly a similar shape is easy to justify by being inspired on the same critters, it is not evidence of copy.
There are two separate comparison videos in that article, as well as the posts from industry figures discussing the comparisons that were uploaded and how damning they are.
HOWEVER. It has come to my attention that the original poster who created those videos edited the Palworld models to make it look more damning. I was going off bad information, and I acknowledge you're correct, there no -valid- evidence Palworld directly stole models.
That said, you have to be a blind to think they aren't shameless Pokemon knockoffs. It goes far beyond mere passing similarities, most pals are assembled from chopped up Pokemon (quite thematically appropriate I suppose). Nintendo certainly thinks so too: https://www.ign.com/articles/the-pokemon-company-makes-an-official-statement-on-palworld-we-intend-to-investigate
It's crazy to assume that just because Nintendo must be perfectly fine with it just because they didn't file a lawsuit the day after the game launched.
Man, thats really funny, thats exactly what I was thinking about you when I read your comments the first time
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.
That's entirely missing the only reason Nintendo would actually pursue legal action. Many Palworld creatures appear to have literally identical base model proportions to Pokemon models. So exactly identical it's hard to believe it could happen once by chance, much less with over a dozen different creatures. It very strongly appears they took and modified straight Pokemon models, or at best used them as a direct reference.
It very strongly appears they took and modified straight Pokemon models, or at best used them as a direct reference.
No. Definitively no. The models aren't even remotely similar. Here's an example with Lycanroc vs. Direhowl, one of the contentious pairs:
- different proportions: Direhowl is considerably bulkier. Lycanroc has thinner legs and belly
- some parts don't have good analogues: Lycanroc's fang is missing, Direhowl has a rather detailed nose, tufts of hair on its back legs, and a tuft of hair between both ears.
- analogue parts are shaped differently: best seen with the neck fur - Direhowl's is fluffy, Lycanroc's is spiky.
- the number of points of any part simply does not coincide. And it's hard to claim that Direhowl's mesh was Lycanroc's minus a few points, because Direhowl has a lot more points near the extremities.
It would be literally easier to create a Direhowl-like model from the scratch than to distort Lycanroc's model this way. And that is likely what they did, they clearly did not copy Lycanroc's model. Similarities are simply easier to explain by the fact that both are inspired on wolves.
Same applies to other pairs of creatures.
If you want to see how reused/copied models would look like, check this. It's from an old controversy where GameFreak lied to the players that they had to redo the models from the scratch, to justify Dexit.
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.
Fair use doesn't work that way. The mod may be defensible if it targets the copyrighted material with implicit or explicit commentary, doesn't usurp the original market, and only takes what is necessary for that commentary. But even then, it is a legal defense and doesn't prevent a lawsuit. And further, it is based on US law and Nintendo is a Japanese company that may assert its own laws in Japanese courts.
Whether or not it's free has next to no bearing, unfortunately.
You're not wrong, but being free does make a pretty massive difference in this context. After all, there are literally hundreds of pokemon mods for other games, and hundreds more fan games and romhacks. Some of them are huge, like Pokemon Infinite Fusion has a discord with over 400,000 people. The only time Nintendo decides to come after those projects is when they start trying to make money.
Right, yes. Whatever the legal situation, there's always the chance that Nintendo doesn't come after you because you aren't seen as commercially profiting, even though it doesn't affect the fair use analysis.
But also, Nintendo absolutely has at times gone after projects even if they don't make money - they are the not always the most aggressive, but they are very unpredictable.
I dunno if that's true but if it is, can you then explain why are nexusmods and steam hosting tons of marvel/disney content without any repercussions for example? What's the difference between that and the pokemon mod, if not the asking price?
Nexus and Steam and U.S.-based sites have § 230 protections that prevent liability unless/until they receive a takedown notice or are acting recklessly.
So they basically allow user-generated content until someone issues a DMCA notice. If they do not take down the content at that point, they can be sued. But at any point Disney or any other rightsholder can demand content to be taken down. If there is a fair use argument, the person posting it can respond to the service with a counternotice and demand it be re-enabled, after which the company has a choice to sue them directly.
Based on that, most user-generated spaces do not police content unless they are asked, since they have liability protection and can respond case-by-case to complaints. Also, they may be held to a higher standard if they conduct active enforcement. Sites like YouTube that have very mature fingerprinting and enforcement do so because it helps them have relationships with businesses, avoid large litigations, and sell ads.
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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.
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What this mod did would not be considered fair use anywhere else either.
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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