We’re coming up on the first anniversary of Nintendo’s lawsuit against Pocketpair, the developer of the edgy “Pokémon with guns” survival game Palworld, on the grounds of patent infringement. Though many people called out Palworld for its suspiciously familiar character designs, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company went after Pocketpair not for the appearance of its creatures but for in-game mechanics, such as aiming and firing an “item” at a character in a field to trigger combat, capturing creatures in the wild, and riding on creatures you can swap between easily in an open world. These are extremely broad and non-specific, and if Nintendo felt like it, the company could easily go after plenty of other games beyond Palworld on those grounds. Nintendo and The Pokémon Company aren’t done patenting vague concepts in the Pokémon series, though, as the companies have just patented more mechanics in a development that could affect the entire monster-taming genre.
Games Fray, a site dedicated to reporting on patent law and other legal issues in the video game industry, reports that Nintendo has received a U.S. patent for the mechanic of “summoning a character and letting it fight another.” The step-by-step breakdown of what this entails reads as follows:
(1) A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium having stored therein a game program, the game program causing a processor of an information processing apparatus to execute:
(2) performing control of moving a player character on a field in a virtual space, based on a movement operation input;
(3) performing control of causing a sub character to appear on the field, based on a first operation input, and
(4) when an enemy character is placed at a location where the sub character is caused to appear, controlling a battle between the sub character and the enemy character by a first mode in which the battle proceeds based on an operation input, and
(5) when the enemy character is not placed at the location where the sub character is caused to appear, starting automatic control of automatically moving the sub character that has appeared; and
(6) performing control of moving the sub character in a predetermined direction on the field, based on a second operation input, and, when the enemy character is placed at a location of a designation, controlling a battle between the sub character and the enemy character by a second mode in which the battle automatically proceeds.
Again, this is a pretty general idea that is utilized in plenty of other games, from monster-taming rivals like Digimon to more general games like Final Fantasy that include summonable creatures. It seems unlikely that Nintendo would suddenly start going after partners like Bandai Namco or Square Enix, who have released games on Nintendo platforms without issue, but on principle, Nintendo patenting vague mechanical ideas as a means of monopolizing a genre is a shitty look, and rubs against the Pokémon franchise’s image as something wholesome and joyful. Not that the facade hasn’t already fallen multiple times at this point. The Pokémon Company has so many problems with things like the quality of its games and with making decisions that enable scalpers to capitalize on its merchandise, problems it never really addresses because it’s too successful to fail. It sure has time to patent fairly standard video game mechanics to help it corner the market, though.
The Palworld lawsuit is ongoing, though Nintendo did make some changes to the phrasing of the suit back in July.