Last week, The Pokemon Company and Nintendo officially served public notice that they would be suing Pocketpair for patent infringement in their game Palworld.
As we had reported at the time, since Nintendo didn’t reveal what patents were actually in contention, it was too early to make any judgements on the situation. That didn’t stop rounds of speculation and opinion making on the situation.
Most believe it was a patent describing the action of Pokeballs that is in the center of this issue. Many gamers and lawyers have already jumped to conclusions based off of this, accusing Nintendo of patent trolling.
Of course, everyone is free to have their own opinion, and even without all the information available to us, one can reasonably conclude that this is patent trolling by Nintendo. That, then, creates a narrative of Nintendo as the ‘bad guy’, as some gamers then roll with previous cases of Nintendo winning other lawsuits, and highlighting their money and power.
But is this really an accurate assessment of the situation? Do we all just assume that the bandwagon is correct, because a lot of people we trust and like say the same thing? Or should we be more discriminating in taking in information, and considering what we don’t know?
In Palworld’s official first response to the lawsuit, Pocketpair said that they are a “small indie game company” whose goal was “to create fun games.” What we didn’t know then, was that Japanese indie game developers did not take to their statement well.
As explained by Twitter user NotPeashyBee, indie game developer ZUN, the father of the Touhou Project franchise, threw shade at Pocketpair. In NotPeashyBee’s words:
“Alright after examination it appears this is about Nintendo/TPC vs Palworld court case, and from the looks of it ZUN views Pocketpair as giving a bad name for indie devs so he’s going back to being called a Doujin creator”
Another Twitter user with the handle IceFairy shared even more context, saying:
“Essentially. Palworld JP released a statement that framed the lawsuit as Nintendo vs Indie devs and that they were going to fight it “for us indies, right guys?”.
The reaction from the Japanese scene has been more or less “we’re not with them” or “you don’t speak for us”.
ZUN’s own tweet is essentially “Well, lucky for me, I’m not an indie dev, I’m a doujin dev, so I’m not involved with this at all!” sort of joke.
As a side note, yeah, indie =/= doujin.”
IceFairy also shared translated screenshots of responses to Palworld JP’s tweet. As we’re not a Japanese speaker ourselves, we can’t verify the translations are entirely accurate. But we can link to the original tweet, where you can see some of those replies are still live and the same.
Pocketpair has taken pains to address many prior allegations that Palworld has faced, about plagiarism and use of AI, and their creators’ former involvement in crypto. But perhaps we should have been more discriminating regarding their responses, since they don’t seem to have a good reputation in their native Japan at all.
We can understand if some gamers have become fast fans of Palworld since it launched early last year. Some Xbox gamers may feel they finally have a Pokemon like game of their own. Outside of that, some gamers may genuinely like the game design and concept Pocketpair came up with. But this is where we point out that fandom can cloud your judgement, for The Pokemon Company and Pocketpair alike.
In particular, since we don’t know all the facts about the case, the whole online discourse about the Pokeball mechanic patent is speculatory at best. Really, the court of public opinion doesn’t have the specialization or authority that the actual Japanese criminal justice system has. And yes, that includes journalists, lawyers, and industry analysts. None of them know what patents are in contention or the other facts of the case, we are all still guessing.
We are free to hold our opinions when the facts of the case, and the eventual verdict, do come out. But here and now, it’s perfectly fine to say that we don’t know enough to decide what to think. And there’s no problem with just waiting for the court case to play itself out.
