Nintendo continues its fight against gamers

[Dragonstrike]

The damages sound a lot bigger if you convert it to yen. 5 million yen iirc (EDIT: it's 10 million actually I think? Regardless, half of the sum is for Creatures Inc, other half for Nintendo). Definitely still chump change as far as big lawsuits go, though.

I also saw an article quoting a patent expert basically saying 'this is lawfare bullying.' Ya know, that thing that big companies do to try and knock down the small guys a few pegs through the sheer costs of trying to fight the big guys in court.

Pocketpair absolutely has enough money for the basic damages given how many copies of the game we're sold, and I think the amount of damages isn't the relevant thing here.  The real damage here is going to be in legal fees and (if they lose the case) having to rewrite a large portion of their game's code to put it back up for sale (plus the costs of that additional work).

Something else interesting that I read at one point is that Nintendo apparently tried to get these patents published in the US, but they were denied for being too broad in their current state.  Makes me wonder if Pocketpair has a reasonable chance of demonstrating these concepts have been used in other media and are not wholly unique to Pokemon.

Given these extensions of the PLA patents happened after Palworld's release and the legal challenges came soon after they were published in Japan, plus the injunction attempt, it really does look like a situation where the big guy is trying to bully the little guy.  (I'm sure Sony partnering with Pocketpair to expand the Palworld IP into a multimedia thing started raising eyebrows at Nintendo's business table too).  Kinda in line with how litigious Nintendo has been in general lately too (this is just the highest profile case they've brought forward).

A lawyer going by Moon Channel on YouTube put up a video with his thoughts and analysis of the situation recently.  I'll probably be watching that soon to see what he thinks, though I think that video went up before we knew for sure which parents were involved (not that it was hard to guess).