Palworld developer Pocketpair has revealed details of Nintendo and The Pokémon Company's lawsuit which alleges that the game infringes on multiple patents.
Software patents are fucked, ain't they? You can implement a thing using completely different code, algorithms, hell even programming languages/CPU architectures, and you'd still be infringing. There was some stupid fight over a simple slider UI element to unlock a phone a few years back.
Code is already copyrighted by default, so no need for software patents. Luckily software patents are null and void in EU, so I don't have to worry about that.
The solutions here don't seem to really be solutions in my opinion, especially the third one. It's like if the problem a patent solves was "being able to individually package sandwiches on a conveyor belt" and the solution was "have a machine that recognizes where one sandwich ends and another begins so it can stop and start packaging appropriately." Like, no kidding, but how?
So the first two seem to deal with throwing a capture item at a creature (wild pokemon) and/or releasing a character's own creature to fight it (essentially first seen in Legends Arceus, tossing a ball at a pokemon to aggro it and then fighting it with your pokemon). The third one is, as others have said, Mount transitions (at least in pokemon, also first seen in Legends Arceus if you only count ride pokemon; if vehicles are included I believe the first would be Sword/Shield). Though if vehicles are included Nintendo would have a hard time fighting that one. Vehicle transformation, especially in racing games, has been around forever.
These look like they are after Palworld was released. Was Nintendo just sitting on the patent since Pokeman red/blue? What an unintuitive legal system they have over in Japan.
Looking through the first one's content and it seems reasonable? The patent's abstract is supposed to be as widely applicable as legally permitted, so it's like a completely different language on top of legalese.