Poll of the Day > Musk:too many giant corps. own game studios, so he wants to...make a game studio

(+) Yeah! (+)

ConfusedTorchic posted...

but the patents themselves were granted after palworlds release

Yes hello, I work in IP relating to patents.
That is called "Patent Pending". And, you can go after companies between the time you apply, and, when you get pending.
This is why the Filing Date, and the Effective Filing Date is important.

shadowsword87 posted...

Yes hello, I work in IP relating to patents.
That is called "Patent Pending". And, you can go after companies between the time you apply, and, when you get pending.
This is why the Filing Date, and the Effective Filing Date is important.

Apparently the "patented" game mechanic they're going after were in use in a GTA mod a couple years before Nintendo filed for their patent.

willythemailboy posted...

Apparently the "patented" game mechanic they're going after were in use in a GTA mod a couple years before Nintendo filed for their patent.

I wouldn't default trust anyone's opinion about patents who hasn't gone through at least some training. This may be true, or, they could just be looking at the diagrams and going "yeah this is close to something else". If someone says it's similar, and doesn't mention the claims, for example, it's safe to just discard their opinion.

Also, this may, in fact, be true too. That would be useful for Palworld's attorney's to know about and for them to consider. One of the first things during a case, like this, is to say that the patent that's supposedly being infringed, is that the original patent shouldn't exist in the first place, and showing evidence. The original patent, can, just be nullified.

X owner Elon Musk has taken a brief break from posting racism, transphobia, and conspiracy theory nonsense to say that gaming has become too "woke" because the industry is dominated by massive corporations, and so he is going to use his own massive corporation to start a new game studio powered by AI "to make games great again!"

So he's going to "make games great again" by using the laziest possible method to make said games?

I think I'd rather deal with woke stuff. At least the game will be made by humans.

What patents are they actually claiming? Capturing creatures and doing battle with them? That existed long before even the first Pokemon games.

adjl posted...

What patents are they actually claiming? Capturing creatures and doing battle with them? That existed long before even the first Pokemon games.

These are the equivalent USPTO patents from the JPO.
https://patents.google.com/patent/JP7528390B2/en
https://patents.google.com/patent/JP7493117B2/en
https://patents.google.com/patent/JP7545191B1/en

Note: you need to read the claims, not the abstract. All of the claims too, not just the first one. And all of the words, you can't just ignore a few of them.

It'll be funny when he discovers games take half a decade to make money

shadowsword87 posted...

No but it will break the outrage cycle. Rather than be upset at tweets, be upset at actual things that have actually happened.

We should always be outraged at wealthy narcissistic idiocy.

It should not exist. It should cause outrage that it does. Always.

shadowsword87 posted...

These are the equivalent USPTO patents from the JPO.
https://patents.google.com/patent/JP7528390B2/en
https://patents.google.com/patent/JP7493117B2/en
https://patents.google.com/patent/JP7545191B1/en

Note: you need to read the claims, not the abstract. All of the claims too, not just the first one. And all of the words, you can't just ignore a few of them.

All of the words is a lot, so I just skimmed, but the rough gist seems to be trying to patent mechanics that have been around for a very long time (selecting a variety of mounts and throwing an item to capture things in a field), and it looks like the first filing date for all three are after Palworld came out (January 2024, earliest filing date was February 2024). Am I missing something more?

shadowsword87 posted...

Yes hello, I work in IP relating to patents.
That is called "Patent Pending". And, you can go after companies between the time you apply, and, when you get pending.
This is why the Filing Date, and the Effective Filing Date is important.

and it all happened after palworld was announced

ConfusedTorchic posted...

no they didn't lmfao

You're aware Palworld literally admitted to this, right? They were told to plagiarize Pokmon directly and wholesale copy designs, which is obvious infringement. How this whole thing started is even normal players noticed how blatant it was.

IIRC, the employee that admitted to it is going to testify, but yes that the patent aspects are the more relevant reason Nintendo is suing.

Anyways, let's not get lost here in that the Palworld example that poster used is a bad one, especially in the "Musk can't be bullied because he has money" nonsense. Musk got tricked into buying Twitter, he can certainly be bullied abd manipulated.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

You're aware Palworld literally admitted to this, right? They were told to plagiarize Pokmon directly and wholesale copy designs, which is obvious infringement. How this whole thing started is even normal players noticed how blatant it was.

There's a difference between copying character designs and art assets and copying game mechanics. Those are entirely separate claims and being guilty of one does not mean anything in terms of the other.

adjl posted...

All of the words is a lot, so I just skimmed, but the rough gist seems to be trying to patent mechanics that have been around for a very long time (selecting a variety of mounts and throwing an item to capture things in a field), and it looks like the first filing date for all three are after Palworld came out (January 2024, earliest filing date was February 2024). Am I missing something more?

You're right, all of the words is a lot.
You cannot summarize the full legal documentation and word of a claim.
Each claim must be matched, confirmed, and verified.
This is why patent attorneys ask for a lot of money for their time to do this.

And the effective filing date was from 2021 from the JPO.

At this point we need to just go in and take all his money. He doesn't need it, he doesn't deserve it. Just take it from him. It's legal, he has no right to it. No human should have that much. The problem stems from people thinking they too might one day strike it big and they won't want their money taken from them.

Billionaires should not exist.

KingInBlack posted...

At this point we need to just go in and take all his money. He doesn't need it, he doesn't deserve it. Just take it from him. It's legal, he has no right to it. No human should have that much. The problem stems from people thinking they too might one day strike it big and they won't want their money taken from them.

Billionaires should not exist.

not to say that he doesn't have plenty of cash to grab, but a lot of his 'wealth' is in overinflated stocks

KingInBlack posted...

At this point we need to just go in and take all his money. He doesn't need it, he doesn't deserve it. Just take it from him. It's legal, he has no right to it. No human should have that much. The problem stems from people thinking they too might one day strike it big and they won't want their money taken from them.

Billionaires should not exist.

I was thinking take his properties. Like IPs, buildings, factories, etc.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

You're aware Palworld literally admitted to this, right? They were told to plagiarize Pokmon directly and wholesale copy designs, which is obvious infringement. How this whole thing started is even normal players noticed how blatant it was.

brother, if they actually did that, nintendo would also be going after them for it.

and they're not.

they looked in to it. they found nothing, which is why they pivoted to going after them for infringing on game mechanic patents.

pocketpair did not admit to anything, you have a former disgruntled employee saying they did, and no one else. not even the company they supposedly stole assets and designs from. use those critical thinking skills.

Yeah this is much more of a spite move on Nintendo's part.

shadowsword87 posted...

And the effective filing date was from 2021 from the JPO.

December of 2021.

Palworld was announced in June of 2021.

That's ignoring that the patents they claim are being infringed upon were added to older patents to piggy back on their filing date.

chelle posted...

December of 2021.

Palworld was announced in June of 2021.

That's ignoring that the patents they claim are being infringed upon were added to older patents to piggy back on their filing date.

That's quite literally for the attorneys and judges to figure out.
If the elements were present during the announcement, pre-announcement documentation, if it should have been a continuation in part, and so on.

shadowsword87 posted...

You're right, all of the words is a lot.
You cannot summarize the full legal documentation and word of a claim.

Sure you can. The specifics of "X happens after pushing a third button and then Y happens and then you can choose to make Z happen by pressing a fourth button" form the actual legal nuance of any given claim, and you need every single one of those words to pass an actual legal judgement, but you can absolutely summarize at least the broad concept of what the patent is meant to cover. I'm not looking for a full legal opinion on the extent of the patents, I'm just wondering what ideas they're focusing on.

adjl posted...

Sure you can. The specifics of "X happens after pushing a third button and then Y happens and then you can choose to make Z happen by pressing a fourth button" form the actual legal nuance of any given claim, and you need every single one of those words to pass an actual legal judgement, but you can absolutely summarize at least the broad concept of what the patent is meant to cover. I'm not looking for a full legal opinion on the extent of the patents, I'm just wondering what ideas they're focusing on.

The short version is "aiming a character at a NPC in a specific area, throwing an object to capture that NPC, being able to improve the odds of a successful capture by weakening the NPC, and being able to release that captured NPC to fight other NPCs at a later time".

adjl posted...

Sure you can. The specifics of "X happens after pushing a third button and then Y happens and then you can choose to make Z happen by pressing a fourth button" form the actual legal nuance of any given claim, and you need every single one of those words to pass an actual legal judgement, but you can absolutely summarize at least the broad concept of what the patent is meant to cover. I'm not looking for a full legal opinion on the extent of the patents, I'm just wondering what ideas they're focusing on.

Which is those three patents that are posted.
You're free to read under the broadest reasonable interpretation, and could even act as one skilled in the art.
By defining, and simplifying it, you're putting all independent and dependent claims in a box with your own biases and interpretation, which could just be wrong. The patents are complicated and rough to read, but it's still possible. You could read the abstract and make a judgement call, but I wouldn't recommend telling a judge or an attorney that.

willythemailboy posted...

The short version is "aiming a character at a NPC in a specific area, throwing an object to capture that NPC, being able to improve the odds of a successful capture by weakening the NPC, and being able to release that captured NPC to fight other NPCs at a later time".

There are three patents that are you trying to summarize, could you be more specific?

willythemailboy posted...

The short version is "aiming a character at a NPC in a specific area, throwing an object to capture that NPC, being able to improve the odds of a successful capture by weakening the NPC, and being able to release that captured NPC to fight other NPCs at a later time".

That's about what I was getting, which seems like a ridiculous patent to grant given that such a mechanic exists in other games already (off-hand, the Pixelmon mod for Minecraft did it already with the Pokemon IP long before 2021, and IIRC that's not far off of how capturing pets worked for Hunters in WoW as far back as 2004), but I guess the devil's in the details and the specifics of the implementation they've patented managed to come across as unique.

Somehow, though, that seems simultaneously unreasonably broad because Nintendo did not invent the idea of capturing things by throwing a net at them, but also uselessly narrow because it leaves out any instances of launching a capture device, placing a capture device on the ground, or any other non-thrown implementation of using an item or ability to capture an NPC. Like it manages to hit both "why did you even bother patenting this?" and "this patent does so much to stifle the medium" at the same time, which is an accomplishment.

Of course, I'm guessing the actual extent and value of the patents would be buried in the detailed wording, which is where professionally analyzing them to form a full legal opinion comes in. As far as a layperson trying to get the basic gist from a short summary goes, I think I've got all I reasonably can.

shadowsword87 posted...

There are three patents that are you trying to summarize, could you be more specific?

At a glance, the latter two of the three you linked both seemed to be saying something to that effect, just with different specific implementations. The first one seemed to be more about riding creatures, specifically outlining a method for selecting which mount to use (which, again, WoW did 20 years ago in a broad sense and I don't think there's a ton of room to claim that Nintendo invented anything in that regard).

shadowsword87 posted...

You could read the abstract and make a judgement call, but I wouldn't recommend telling a judge or an attorney that.

That's the thing: I'm not planning on telling a judge or attorney anything, nor making any meaningful judgement call. I'm just trying to get a high-level understanding of what case they're trying to make to pass judgement on how reasonable or unreasonable they are (which is a very distinct concept from how legal their case is). I fully expect that the actual verdict will come down to technicalities that no layperson is likely to suss out beforehand, since that's just the nature of patent law.

Isn't it great how the guy who spent 44 billion on Twitter will soon be the guy to say "we can't afford to let that many old people survive"

adjl posted...

At a glance, the latter two of the three you linked both seemed to be saying something to that effect, just with different specific implementations. The first one seemed to be more about riding creatures, specifically outlining a method for selecting which mount to use (which, again, WoW did 20 years ago in a broad sense and I don't think there's a ton of room to claim that Nintendo invented anything in that regard).

That's a way of looking at it, yes.
If you want to say that WoW did it first, you need to do a full claim by claim analysis, with every element matched with a comparable level of detail. Mostly examiners check other patents because the tools for searching are just better. But the first patent I looked at, actually references the ARK wiki, so that's fun.

adjl posted...

That's the thing: I'm not planning on telling a judge or attorney anything, nor making any meaningful judgement call. I'm just trying to get a high-level understanding of what case they're trying to make to pass judgement on how reasonable or unreasonable they are (which is a very distinct concept from how legal their case is). I fully expect that the actual verdict will come down to technicalities that no layperson is likely to suss out beforehand, since that's just the nature of patent law.

The office declared that it's reasonable enough for a patent.
You can always check the responses from the patent attorney in the associated initial rejection letter, it's fully public and in the library of congress (or just check the Global Dossier).

shadowsword87 posted...

There are three patents that are you trying to summarize, could you be more specific?

All three of them are very similar. And an AI translated version of a patent filing is hardly a legal document, is it?

https://patents.google.com/patent/JP7528390B2/en

Part 1,2 bog standard player movement and mount functionality
Part 3-11 mount movement and fall damage
Part 12-16 additional standard player mount behavior

There's nothing covered in this entire patent application that couldn't just as easily be describing World of Warcraft's mount system as of the release of Burning Crusade in 2006. At best the "novelty" of the application is combining that standard of player control to a capture system but the same type of system has been applied to so many types of games using it in one more cannot be considered novel. Nothing presented here should be eligible for a patent at all, and the only way one would be awarded is if the patent officer is completely unfamiliar with any electronic games released in the past 20+ years.

https://patents.google.com/patent/JP7493117B2/en

Part 1 aiming at a field character, throwing a capture device at it, and capturing that field character
Part 2-4 releasing a character in the player's possession and launching it at a field character to initiate a battle
Part 5-13 displaying the strength and ease of capture of the field character
Part 14-24 releasing a character in the player's possession and launching it at a field character in order to weaken that field character to increase the ease of capture via a capture device

The only marginally original concept in this filing is that a capture device can be used without first initiating a battle. Since I don't play this genre of game I don't know first hand how novel that mechanic may or may not be.

https://patents.google.com/patent/JP7545191B1/en
The translation on this one isn't clearly divided into individual claims but I'll try to hit the high points.

Concepts covered are:
multiple forms of capture item usable
the character taking a particular stance when using a capture item or releasing an owned character
standard character battle mechanics
a repeat of claims of displaying and calculating capture success rates
different capture items having different aiming cursors and capture success rates

Again I'm not very familiar with this game genre but none of that is particularly novel, except possibly in the very specific combination of those factors. But if that is true, the patent application is written broadly enough that it would cover things outside the very specific combination of factors they're claiming. There's certainly nothing novel enough to justify locking out potential competitors for 20+ years.

willythemailboy posted...

All three of them are very similar. And an AI translated version of a patent filing is hardly a legal document, is it?

It's not, which is why you should look at the US filings.

willythemailboy posted...

There's nothing covered in this entire patent application that couldn't just as easily be describing World of Warcraft's mount system as of the release of Burning Crusade in 2006. At best the "novelty" of the application is combining that standard of player control to a capture system but the same type of system has been applied to so many types of games using it in one more cannot be considered novel. Nothing presented here should be eligible for a patent at all, and the only way one would be awarded is if the patent officer is completely unfamiliar with any electronic games released in the past 20+ years.

I'm not familiar with WoW, does it also include the elements for the dependent claims
"6. wherein the visual object is displayed in a miniature form compared to the displayed boarding object and/or the displayed air boarding object." and "12. The system of claim 9, wherein the player character boarding the boarding object includes a state where the player character dangles from the boarding object."?
And, can you point to exact documentation for it?
If so, congratulations, you can contact Palworld's attorney and write up their documentation, if they want it. If you can write the verbiage of the claims with exact references, to the broadest reasonable interpretation to one skilled in the art, that's a solid reason that the patent should be nullified. This is the first thing that defending patent attorneys do.

willythemailboy posted...

Again I'm not very familiar with this game genre but none of that is particularly novel, except possibly in the very specific combination of those factors. But if that is true, the patent application is written broadly enough that it would cover things outside the very specific combination of factors they're claiming. There's certainly nothing novel enough to justify locking out potential competitors for 20+ years.

1. This is not a patent application, this is a full-fledged patent.
2. Novel doesn't mean interesting or useful, it means unique, for patents. This combination, by your own admission, could be a unique.
3. It has a limited scope, it's still a system/processor/memory, aka electronic in nature, and, all of those dependent claims limit the scope.

"6. wherein the visual object is displayed in a miniature form compared to the displayed boarding object and/or the displayed air boarding object."

Depending on how strictly you define "miniature form", yes.

And, can you point to exact documentation for it?

And it's at this point you confirmed you're trolling rather than having a serious discussion

It has a limited scope, it's still a system/processor/memory, aka electronic in nature,

Meaningless, as the described system could not possibly work in any other medium.

all of those dependent claims limit the scope.

Only if those dependent claims are considered necessary for something to violate the patent. Such as:

"12. The system of claim 9, wherein the player character boarding the boarding object includes a state where the player character dangles from the boarding object."?

If a system can copy everything listed except this claim and still be said to violate the patent, this is not any sort of scope limitation.

willythemailboy posted...

And it's at this point you confirmed you're trolling rather than having a serious discussion

This is literally my job, I work for the USPTO doing this exact sort of prior art checking and mapping. Every claim, every element, finding prior art and mapping damn near noun by noun, with another (or multiple) pieces of prior art.
It is tedious, incredibly technical, but I'm WFH and paid good-ly for my degree and area.

willythemailboy posted...

If a system can copy everything listed except this claim and still be said to violate the patent, this is not any sort of scope limitation.

I'm also saying, very explicitly, you need to match every claim to be in violation. This is what Nintendo's lawyers are doing right now with Palworld and what they are talking about with their lawyers.

shadowsword87 posted...

"6. wherein the visual object is displayed in a miniature form compared to the displayed boarding object and/or the displayed air boarding object."

There are icons for your mounts that are used to trigger them from your action bars, and IIRC as of WotLK (2008) there's a menu for looking through your collection of mounts that displays a miniature model of them. Unless that's specifically saying "the visual object appears in miniature form in the field, then grows when you want to ride it," that one's 100% already covered by WoW (among other games before and since, WoW's just the one I can most readily think of off-hand).

shadowsword87 posted...

and "12. The system of claim 9, wherein the player character boarding the boarding object includes a state where the player character dangles from the boarding object."?

That, I'm less sure of, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't a mount at some point in WoW's history where players hang from it instead of sitting on top. I'm also 99% sure that some of the flight path mounts show the characters hanging underneath, though they're separate from regular mounts (they're effectively just a fast travel cutscene) and probably would not fall within the scope of a patent looking at player-controlled mounts. WoW aside, Nintendo also did not invent dangling from a flying creature while it carries you, so even if it's technically unique when combined with every other claim, that's a pretty dubious thing to try patenting in the first place.

shadowsword87 posted...

The office declared that it's reasonable enough for a patent.

The office declared that it's legally distinct enough for a patent. "Reasonable" in a layperson's sense is another matter entirely, and given the timing I can't help but suspect that this was a matter of Nintendo just throwing things at the wall to see what would stick and might head off creative decisions Palworld and other Pokemon-inspired games might make.

More than reasonableness or legality, though, it doesn't seem to have any value except to spite other people trying to make games. Nintendo stands to gain absolutely nothing if Pokemon is the only game in which players can ride NPC creatures and sometimes dangle underneath them instead of sitting on top. That's not going to make or break even a single person's purchasing decision, whether for Pokemon or for any hypothetical Pokemon competitor. Meanwhile, those developing other games where mounting creatures is a feature are going to have to arbitrarily avoid mount designs where the player can be said to dangle, which is just petty and annoying.

adjl posted...

The office declared that it's legally distinct enough for a patent. "Reasonable" in a layperson's sense is another matter entirely, and given the timing I can't help but suspect that this was a matter of Nintendo just throwing things at the wall to see what would stick and might head off creative decisions Palworld and other Pokemon-inspired games might make.

I could see that. They're also patents that haven't gone through any prosecution, so maybe they're just throwing stuff around, maybe they're confident that it's the best that they have. I'm not them.

adjl posted...

it doesn't seem to have any value except to spite other people trying to make games

Yeah this is punitive from Nintendo, they want money out of this.

shadowsword87 posted...

This is literally my job, I work for the USPTO doing this exact sort of prior art checking and mapping. Every claim, every element, finding prior art and mapping damn near noun by noun, with another (or multiple) pieces of prior art.
It is tedious, incredibly technical, but I'm WFH and paid good-ly for my degree and area.

While possibly true, that does not preclude trolling.

shadowsword87 posted...

I'm also saying, very explicitly, you need to match every claim to be in violation. This is what Nintendo's lawyers are doing right now with Palworld and what they are talking about with their lawyers.

If I'm understanding you correctly, so long as Palworld deliberately avoided making a mount with the character dangling from it that would be sufficient to make every other aspect of their game that does copy Nintendo's work not a violation of the patent? If so, what possible reason would Nintendo have for including such an obvious loophole in their patent?

willythemailboy posted...

If I'm understanding you correctly, so long as Palworld deliberately avoided making a mount with the character dangling from it that would be sufficient to make every other aspect of their game that does copy Nintendo's work not a violation of the patent? If so, what possible reason would Nintendo have for including such an obvious loophole in their patent?

Yup, it's perfectly viable for Palworld to just... remove that from the game or remove a distinguishing factor.

willythemailboy posted...

If so, what possible reason would Nintendo have for including such an obvious loophole in their patent?

My guess would be that a broader patent was denied, presumably because not a single person in the world believes that Nintendo was the first one to invent riding mounts in games in 2021. They wanted to do something to lock down the idea of mounting Pokemon, and given that "this bird just grabs you and carries you around" is a completely suitable interpretation of riding a mount within the Pokemon universe (I'm pretty sure exactly that has happened to Ash on numerous occasions), they felt that was worth securing.

shadowsword87 posted...

They're also patents that haven't gone through any prosecution, so maybe they're just throwing stuff around

This is a good point. This is what's going to try those patents by fire, and I could believe that previously they just had them for the sake of "maybe we'll be able to use them someday" and/or "this keeps other people from using a patent like this against us." Now, they get to test it, and either have it shot down as being a patent that should never have existed, or they get some money for it.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/a/a72bd2db.jpg

https://futurism.com/elon-musk-city-mars-death-catastrophe

captpackrat posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/a/a72bd2db.jpg

https://futurism.com/elon-musk-city-mars-death-catastrophe

Yep! Logistically, it's fucking impossible, at least using his 'plans'. and stupid.

https://youtu.be/c-FGwDDc-s8

captpackrat posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/a/a72bd2db.jpg

https://futurism.com/elon-musk-city-mars-death-catastrophe

Yeah but it will be all rich people. Us poor people will be left on the dying Earth

it would probably involve extremely underutilized tunnels using cars to create an even slower form of mass transportation that takes longer than just walking across the street

The thing that kills any hope of Mars colonization is that Mars' core too cold and basically has no magnetosphere. So Mars is hopelessly irradiated by the sun. We might as well resettle chernobyl.

We'd have to find some way to re-ignite the core (Basically impossible) AND remove the radiation from the planet (also basically impossible.)

Settling Mars is pointless.

I had the luck of working with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson 10 years ago, and he said the same thing then as he did recently when asked about Musk colonizing Mars: If we have the awesome technology to do that, why wouldn't we apply that thought and resources to saving Earth? And essentially, "Why would we go to Mars? To ruin another planet?"

It's pretty clear at this point that Musk is an idiot who just says things, without any real thought behind them. Doubly funny that he himself would have almost 0 input achieving these things, but the actual smart people that run his companies.

Sadly, there's a staggering amount of people, even normally smart people, that don't know much about Musk's background, and think he is some sort of genius just because he owns Tesla and SpaceX. Especially among Gen Z men, where there is a weird sort of hero worship around billionaires forming.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Doubly funny that he himself would have almost 0 input achieving these things, but the actual smart people that run his companies.

TBF that's not actually a bad ability to have in a CEO, the ability to select outstanding subordinates and then getting the hell out of their way. Musk appears to be pretty good at the first part and really bad at the second part.