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A letter to Nintendo
a year ago
Today, I contacted Nintendo about their treatment of other game developers in the industry, and I think this should be an open letter as I am announcing a personal boycott of their products to them and I want a public record of that so I can be held accountable to that. Whenever criticizing someone, please remember to remain polite, sober and stay away from superlatives. While heightened emotions are often understandable, letting them show while making an argument will only make you look like someone who can easily be swayed and brought back around later.
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"Dear Nintendo,
I have been playing video games for over 20 years of my life now. It is one of my largest hobbies and your consoles and games have always been a big part of that. From the early days of playing Super Nintendo games at my relatives house to one day getting my very own GameCube all the way to the present where I greatly enjoy playing on the Switch, you have always provided me with great products that have made my life a lot more varied and fun. The Fire Emblem games have been some of my favourites ever since their release here in the West, Pokemon has been a great inspiration for me for many many years and I have always enjoyed a great new Legend of Zelda game. Even to this day, I still defend the Wii U whenever it comes up in conversations with my friends, because I genuinely believe it was a very good console. Therefore it is with great sadness that the recent decisions your company made have led me to decide that I will no longer be supporting you as a customer.
Of course, even with all the highs, there are always lows as well. I understand that and of course with a large company like yours, it is inevitable that I am not always going to agree with all of your decisions. Like when you attempted to control what youtubers were allowed to say about your products, or your ongoing attempts to ban fan-games made for non-profit by your most passionate fans. Even those decisions, while I strongly disagreed with them, were things I could ultimately look past and continue on. But your recent lawsuit against Pocketpair Inc. is an overreach that I am no longer willing to accept.
Your company has filed a patent on some incredibly generic game mechanics specifically for the purpose to gain some legal justification to fight your competition. Worse, those patents were filed after the release of Palworld, the game you are currently suing. Even worse, there was no attempt from you to communicate and mediate the issues with Pocketpair beforehand. No reaching out, no warnings, no attempts at all to even seek a conversation with the development team. And worse yet again, you did not even leave it at a cease and desist letter. You decided to sue for damages right away.
I can not read these actions as anything else than a targeted attempt to destroy your competition through unfair, and frankly, cowardly means. Furthermore, your actions have shown me that you do not care for innovation in the gaming industry unless it is done and owned exclusively by you. These are the actions of a company who would rather intimidate and bully the competition rather than beating them by making a better product. Actions like these will stifle innovation in the gaming industry and make this hobby worse for both customers and developers. This lawsuit is not about defending your rights or property, or otherwise you would not have needed to file a patent for creature capturing mechanics as recently as May 2024. These are the actions of a company that is willing to use underhanded tactics in order to protect their empire.
I am an individual that greatly values creativity and peoples rights to express it freely. As such, I can no longer support a company that seeks to use their position of power to suppress smaller creators. I love your products and your games, but I can no longer in good conscience justify supporting a company that acts this hostile towards other people.
I am fully aware that losing a single customer is merely a drop in the bucket for a company the size of yours, but I hope this illustrates to you that at least parts of your customer-base have a line at which they are no longer willing to look past your actions. I am going through the effort of writing this letter to you in the hope that it will make a small difference in making you reconsider the course you are taking and improving to be better in the future. If this lawsuit is dropped, I will reconsider my stance on this and perhaps I will be able to justify buying Nintendo products again in the future. But as it stands, I can no longer see myself as a paying customer of yours.
Thank you for your consideration, and despite everything I said, I do hope whoever is reading this has a nice day."
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As an addendum, I would also like to remind everyone that all of my own characters as well as any art I make that features exclusively my own original creations is available under a Creative Commons license and freely available for your non-profit uses. I love it when people pursue their own creative pursuits and I want to put as little road-blocks as I can between that. If anything I make inspires you, feel free to use it. Ideas are there to be shared, not to be hoarded.
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"Dear Nintendo,
I have been playing video games for over 20 years of my life now. It is one of my largest hobbies and your consoles and games have always been a big part of that. From the early days of playing Super Nintendo games at my relatives house to one day getting my very own GameCube all the way to the present where I greatly enjoy playing on the Switch, you have always provided me with great products that have made my life a lot more varied and fun. The Fire Emblem games have been some of my favourites ever since their release here in the West, Pokemon has been a great inspiration for me for many many years and I have always enjoyed a great new Legend of Zelda game. Even to this day, I still defend the Wii U whenever it comes up in conversations with my friends, because I genuinely believe it was a very good console. Therefore it is with great sadness that the recent decisions your company made have led me to decide that I will no longer be supporting you as a customer.
Of course, even with all the highs, there are always lows as well. I understand that and of course with a large company like yours, it is inevitable that I am not always going to agree with all of your decisions. Like when you attempted to control what youtubers were allowed to say about your products, or your ongoing attempts to ban fan-games made for non-profit by your most passionate fans. Even those decisions, while I strongly disagreed with them, were things I could ultimately look past and continue on. But your recent lawsuit against Pocketpair Inc. is an overreach that I am no longer willing to accept.
Your company has filed a patent on some incredibly generic game mechanics specifically for the purpose to gain some legal justification to fight your competition. Worse, those patents were filed after the release of Palworld, the game you are currently suing. Even worse, there was no attempt from you to communicate and mediate the issues with Pocketpair beforehand. No reaching out, no warnings, no attempts at all to even seek a conversation with the development team. And worse yet again, you did not even leave it at a cease and desist letter. You decided to sue for damages right away.
I can not read these actions as anything else than a targeted attempt to destroy your competition through unfair, and frankly, cowardly means. Furthermore, your actions have shown me that you do not care for innovation in the gaming industry unless it is done and owned exclusively by you. These are the actions of a company who would rather intimidate and bully the competition rather than beating them by making a better product. Actions like these will stifle innovation in the gaming industry and make this hobby worse for both customers and developers. This lawsuit is not about defending your rights or property, or otherwise you would not have needed to file a patent for creature capturing mechanics as recently as May 2024. These are the actions of a company that is willing to use underhanded tactics in order to protect their empire.
I am an individual that greatly values creativity and peoples rights to express it freely. As such, I can no longer support a company that seeks to use their position of power to suppress smaller creators. I love your products and your games, but I can no longer in good conscience justify supporting a company that acts this hostile towards other people.
I am fully aware that losing a single customer is merely a drop in the bucket for a company the size of yours, but I hope this illustrates to you that at least parts of your customer-base have a line at which they are no longer willing to look past your actions. I am going through the effort of writing this letter to you in the hope that it will make a small difference in making you reconsider the course you are taking and improving to be better in the future. If this lawsuit is dropped, I will reconsider my stance on this and perhaps I will be able to justify buying Nintendo products again in the future. But as it stands, I can no longer see myself as a paying customer of yours.
Thank you for your consideration, and despite everything I said, I do hope whoever is reading this has a nice day."
---
As an addendum, I would also like to remind everyone that all of my own characters as well as any art I make that features exclusively my own original creations is available under a Creative Commons license and freely available for your non-profit uses. I love it when people pursue their own creative pursuits and I want to put as little road-blocks as I can between that. If anything I make inspires you, feel free to use it. Ideas are there to be shared, not to be hoarded.
If you don't mind a tiny, tiny bit of editing advice: On the sentence: "Your company has filed a patent on some incredibly generic game mechanics specifically for the purpose to gain some legal justification..." it should be "specifically for the purpose of gaining..."
Thanks for sharing, and do let us know if you get a reply!
I honestly don't see it doing a lot of good either, but I think this is about the best shot one has as a singular person to get them to at least take note. I can't really do more than to vote with my wallet, and if they have to guestimate what my reasons for that are (if for some reason they'd even have noticed... somehow?) it's not gonna help in adressing the actual issues I have. It's really unfortunate too cause I really like many of their games and up to this point I thought that in the grand scheme of modern AAA gaming companies, they were one of the "less bad" ones. But for all the shady and immoral stuff almost all of them do, actively going after other companies and trying to prevent them from making their own games is a line I haven't yet seen crossed.
Thank you, and I will certainly let you know if I get anything other than the automated "Thank you for your message" reply.
It is a shame, and it seems to me to be a precedent that doesn't need to be set. If a company can sue over similar game mechanics, what else could they sue over? I get trying to protect copyright and intellectual property rights, and all that. But capturing/summoning creatures for use in combat or to aid in adventuring has shown up in so many different forms in so many different games and stories and what have you, that you're absolutely right that this seems a bridge too far.
The actual patent they filed is even more absurd than just catching creatures or the specifc designs. While I don't agree with that either, that'd be somewhat understandable, and it's what many people thought they'd take action over (cause admittedly, some of the designs in Palworld are a bit dubiously close to existing Pokemon, but nothing that crosses any lines in my copyleft mind). The actual patent they filed is over the game mechanic of "Pressing a button to go into a seperate aiming-mode, then pressing a seperate button to make your character throw an object", which is how throwing Pokeballs works in the newer Pokemon games and the same goes for Palspheres in Palworld. Concerningly, that's also how throwing grenades works in about every other modern shooter game, as well as any number of other benign games where you do the incredibly rare and unique thing of "throwing objects after pressing a button to aim first".
We already have a couple examples of patents holding otherwise good game mechanics hostage and preventing other devs from using them, like the nemesis system from the Middle Earth games (essentially orc commanders in those games can survive encounters with you or even win them, and they'll remember past losses and victories, essentially building up their own unique rapport with you over time), or radial dialogue menus (no one other than Bioware is currently allowed to align dialogue options in a circle, which... okay, there are workable workarounds for that one, but still weird). This one is a lot more generic and far reaching than any of those, and I desperately hope it doesn't hold up.
It was quite polite and professional, and they assured me they'd add my feedback to their pile on this case and make it available to the relevant departments (Small mistake on my part, I accidentaly contacted Nintendo Europe while it is Nintendo Japan who is responsible for this case). And yeah, it sounded like an actual person took some time to write out those 4-5 sentences, so not an automated reply or anything. So yeah, about what I expected, if not a bit nicer than that. At least their customer service seems to be pretty alright.
Sometimes, makes me sad to be a super fan of Legend of Zelda. The execs at Nintendo Japan are so terrible with this stuff, even Nintendo of America once called them out on it subtly (I believe when someone complained to Nintendo America, they said essentially "It wasn't us, it was Japan").
Yeah, Japan has a very different culture about this sort of thing. Still, if you're a global player, you can't really play that card anymore as far as I am concerned. It sucks for the people at Nintendo America who might be better about these things, but unfortunately it's still Nintendo Japan who are calling the shots on these things.
And that's exactly what this is. But if Nintendo can successfully extract money from anyone who uses a particular concept in their games, of course they're going to do that. One could even make the argument that this isn't on Nintendo, it's on the government for allowing them to do it, because corporations are obliged to do whatever will bring them the most profit. (I'm not saying I take that stance, but I know some people would.)
Also, major blame on whoever approved that patent in the first place. They clearly had no idea (or were convinced to be willfully ignorant) about video games and how incredibly common and old a mechanic "toggle an aiming mode for throwing objects" is. Patents are there to protect the interests of inventors and people who have to pre-invest massive ammounts of research before they can sell their products, and even if applied as intended I'd argue these laws do more harm than good nowadays. If someone can file a patent for the video game equivalent of "using pen shaped objects to create drawings" then someone absolutely didn't pay attention.
All I see online are speculations. How do we know if anything on the internet is true or not?
So my mentality when asks me if Palworld or Nintendo is in the wrong, is to just 'Wait and See.'
It's also likely not about the "stolen" creature designs, cause that would be a copyright or maaaaaybe a trademark issue, not a patent violation. Regardless, not seeking to mediate or even communicate before going right for a lawsuit is not accedtable in my book, even if it turns out they were in the right about what they are suing for.
But yes, we do not have the full picture on this and it's always wise to be very careful with online rumors.
Palworld however is a game that I hold in high regards, with a studio behind it that understands and respects it's audience. Playing it and engaging with the world it has built has brought me great joy and is continuing to do so. Actively trying to mess up the actually good parts of the industry for unjustified reasons is something I just couldn't stay quiet about, even if it likely won't do much if anything.
Fortunately, I wasn't a fan of their games to begin with, so the decision wasn't hard to take, but I feel sorry that you felt the need to make the same choice while you said you loved some of their games. That's a thing that shouldn't happen. But you're right, Nintendo's decision regarding Palworld is absolutely ridiculous and is one of their decisions that definitely deserves a massive boycott.
Yeah, it kind of sucks to be honest. I still own a either physical or digital copies of some of my favourite games of theirs, but I certainly won't be purchasing any new ones unless this gets resolved, by which I mean Nintendo dropping their charges before this goes any further.
I can’t do that. If I boycotted every company that did stuff like that, I probably would not have much joy in my life.
Its sad that companies have so much power over our favourite things, but I just hope the law will see sense.
It really is, yeah. It's a large part of why I have been somewhat outspoken against our current copyright and patent laws (and trademarks to a lesser extent). They are unfortunately something of a necessary evil in a system that demands innovation and artistic expression also be financially profitable to be allowed to exist, but that's probably the kindest thing you'll hear me say about them.
"You all think you have great ideas for Pokemon games, but if I actually listened to all of you and we combined all of your ideas in a game, it would be an unplayable monstrosity. You want a game with all the regions, but only the first generation Pokemons, yet all the legendary ones and such silly things. Whenever I receive one of these rants, I go to the development floor and read it out loud to all the Game Freak employees in a mocking voice, and we all laugh at you."
-Satoshi Tajiri, Creator of Pokemon