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Has The Pokémon Company just made itself the exclusive creator of creature battlers?
"Hello there, welcome back to GRTV News, I'm Alex, as always going through the afternoons latest and greatest when it comes to gaming, technology, entertainment, whatever you like and indeed whatever you love, we always have it here for you at GRTV News and in the wider Gamereactor network as a whole, so if you like what you see and you want to see more, be sure to check out Gamereactor wherever you get it from for more gaming reviews, gaming previews, movie reviews, series reviews, exclusives, interviews, world news, sports news and of course so much more."
"Without further ado, today we're talking about Pokemon and a new pattern which might affect a lot of games moving forward.
So Pokemon has patented character summoning and battling, now that might sound like quite a broad pattern but we'll get into specific details in a moment, basically in essence this comes from a 2023 patent filing that Pokemon, the Pokemon company made which went through without a hitch which targets mechanics like characters being able to summon sub-characters as in the Pokemon games, characters walking around in a simulated environment, characters interacting with characters and automatically being invited to battle when a sub-character meets a character, all of the things that you expect from Pokemon games, that's coming out here and it seems to be that this might be used in the legal dispute currently ongoing against Pocket Pair, the people who made Power World for copyright infringement on Pokemon's IP."
"So there was this big thing when Power World first came out that was sort of targeting Power World and pointing to a lot of people trying to get the Pokemon company to sue Power World for copyright infringement, whether you believe that Power World is guilty of copyright infringement or not, it was a fact that at the time people were very much talking to the Pokemon company and trying to make them aware of the game so that they could perhaps pursue things legally."
"It at first seemed that the Pokemon company wasn't going to pursue any action and then as time has gone by they have now entered a court battle, Pocket Pair is going to fight that court battle and yet patents like these might make it a bit more difficult, especially in the future for things that look like Power World or Pokemon or any sort of creature battler at all can come out because we're talking here other IPs like Digimon for example use battling and sub-creature summoning and sub-character summoning."
"So it's very interesting to see this come out and this to go off without a hitch because it could affect a lot of games, there's a lot of indie games as well out there that try and utilise the Pokemon sort of genre and formula and that creature battling formula especially in order to sell themselves to a wider audience, look at Cassette Beasts for example is a great recent example of a game that has drawn a lot of praise for it's building on the Pokemon formula but it's hard to say that it is completely different from something like Pokemon."
"So we'll have to see how this affects gaming going forward because really this patent could do a lot, it feels about as large as a patent say for Warner Bros patenting the Nemesis system in a way that we might not see a whole sort of sub-genre of features and mechanics now because this patent is owned by the Pokemon Company meaning that you might not see creatures battling as much and games with creatures in them not being summoned in certain ways but we'll have to wait and see how much this is going to affect things, it might just be that the Pokemon Company uses this patent primarily for it's legal battle game Power World and doesn't seem to use it as much in the future but yeah let me know what you think about the Pokemon Company patenting characters summoning and battling, do you think it's fair enough considering they've made Pocket Monsters or do you think it's a step too far and limits other developers too much, let me know and I'll see you soon for some more GRT news, goodbye."
