adjl posted...
If there is going to be a copyright/trademark case, it's going to be that some of the designs are a little
too
similar to existing Pokemon designs, not the basic concept of a monster taming game (which has been done numerous other times, often in ways that are much closer to Pokemon's gameplay than Palworld is). I don't think anything's likely to stick, but that's going to be the only possible avenue for suing them.
Even that's not enough. Digimon would've been able to end Pokemon back in the 90s if "thing looks like thing" was a strong case. There's some talk that the Palworld devs might've ripped models from a Scarlet and Violet and then tweaked them which would definitely be enough but is also difficult to convincingly prove to a jury so even then might not be enough.
I'm not sure where this meme that Gamefreak/Nintendo/Pokemon Company is suing/has sued/is thinking about suing Pocket Pair came from. They didn't care about TemTem or Doke-V or Cassette Beasts or Bugsnax or Coromon or Yokai Watch or whatever other ones I could Google up. People just willed this beef into existence because everyone kept saying "Pokemon with guns!" (even though it's apparently just Ark but it looks like Fortnite and it also has some discount Digimon in it) and then thought that Nintendo would kill it like they always do with fan games that use their IP.
Nintendo is not fucking scared of Palworld. Palworld has a leg up on the other also-rans because its moving a lot of copies but the idea that Pokemon is going to be knocked off its throne or that Palworld is setting some kind of precedent is such a bizarre thought. Wait to see if its even around a year from now let alone putting up a million concurrents on Steam or whatever the record is before acting like its the biggest franchise in the world.