It took less than 24 hours for Palworld's Pokemon mod to get hit by Nintendo's lawyers
Jan. 23, 2024Well, that was quick
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Nintendo is seemingly filing takedown requests against Pokemon mods forPalworld.
Yesterday, just a few days after Palworld launched into early access last week, wequickly saw a Pokemon modoverhauling the game’s creatures with ‘mons themselves. People were talking about Palworld as ‘Pokemon with guns’ before launch, and now they’ve truly delivered on that vision with Pikachu and others in the new survival game.
It seems like Nintendo andThe Pokemon Companyaren’t fans. According to the tweet below from YouTuber Toasted, Nintendo or The Pokemon Company has taken aim at his video promoting the Palworld mod, and the video has been taken offline as a result of the copyright claim from the company.
OnePalworld modding community even banned Pokemon mods, such was its fear of Nintendo’s retaliation. That seems to be the case for the NexusMods community just below - the Reddit post claims NexusMods staff have begun removing Pokemon mods for Palworld entirely.
Interestingly, lawyer Richard Hoeg has weighed in on the original video from Toasted being taken down. The lawyer believes that although the mod itself is clearly infringing on Pokemon’s copyright, he thinks it does a “decent job” of showing just how different the core game of Palworld actually is from your standard Pokemon game.
At the core, Hoeg’s argument is bang on: Palworld is very much a survival game, with some RPG stylings layered on top, whereas Pokemon games are fundamentally RPGs. We even wrote yesterday about whywe need to stop calling Palworld ‘Pokemon with guns,‘and it all hinges on the survival and management genre trappings of the new game.
On the other hand,Pokemon’s former legal head has weighed in on Palworld, and called it “the usual ripoff nonsense that I would see a thousand times a year.” That’s pretty damning stuff, and from the head of Pokemon’s legal department, no less.
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