Alright, guess this toy’s gonna talk about Palworld, because it’s seen Discourse™️ start to crop up about how “supporting the game is immoral because it’s stealing designs from Pokemon!”
Now look, this toy’s not about to sit here and tell you that all of the monster designs in Palworld are completely original and the game isn’t, on some level, a bootleg. Obviously a lot of the designs are bootleg pokemon. That’s not the point it wants to get at. The point is that it doesn’t really matter.
First of all, nobody is being hurt by Palworld having knockoff pokemon among the ranks of its monsters. Game Freak is not some tiny indie developer struggling to make ends meet having their work unfairly co-opted by a big, bad corporation. Pokemon is, in fact, the largest, most profitable media franchise of all time, and Palworld is an indie game. The reason that something like this would hypothetically be scummy/shitty is if someone were taking someone else’s work, changing it slightly, claiming it as their own, and thus depriving the original creator of credit/visibility that they should’ve had. But that literally can’t happen here, because everyone already knows what Pokemon is. So unless it gets found that they’re stealing designs from fakemon artists or something (there was one alleged instance, but it seems to have just been a coincidence of two different people having the idea of “what if Chimecho but with big, bulky arms?”), Palworld is hurting nobody through having bootleg designs, so the moral argument against the game falls flat.
With that out of the way, there’s a much more interesting topic to discuss here: Why is it that when someone’s fangame gets C&D’d, everyone immediately jumps to the creator’s support, accurately assessing that our copyright system is broken and primarily serves to hurt independent artists, but the moment a developer makes the changes necessary to make sure their fangame doesn’t get hit with a C&D (and to allow them to make money off of it), it’s suddenly bad and cringe and unoriginal?
The argument that “Palworld is lazy and unoriginal and therefore bad because the monster designs are too similar to Pokemon’s designs” is something that this toy would be willing to hear out if Palworld were a turn-based singles-format RPG with similar systems/overall structure to those found in Pokemon games, but, uh. It isn’t. It’s a third-person shooter with monster-catching mechanics and, like, Factorio-ass automation and base-building, from what this toy can tell. And it doesn’t know if the game is good, as someone who has not played it (or even really seen gameplay of it), but it can absolutely tell you that the game’s not lazy.
Sure, they could have done more to make the monster designs feel more unique, and that’s absolutely a valid criticism for the game. This toy doesn’t want to come across like it’s saying otherwise. It just wants people to recognize that that’s kind of a nitpick when the game is, on a mechanical and genre level, something completely different from anything any Pokemon game ever has been or ever will be, and that nobody would be complaining about laziness or a lack of originality if this came out as a fangame literally just using actual pokemon. In that reality, people would’ve been popping off at how high-effort it is, actually. And like, even putting money aside, this game literally could not exist as a fangame. A while back, someone uploaded some videos on Youtube showcasing a fangame they were developing that was an FPS where the enemies were pokemon. They got hit with a C&D and their Youtube account was terminated within a couple days of the videos being uploaded. The game was not monetized, and in fact, never even had a download link, to this toy’s recollection. Palworld would have suffered the same exact fate if it wasn’t its own IP.
Okay but the company also used stuff for their other games from indie developers, like Hollow Knight, without permission. They also used fan pokemon designs without credit to the people who made them in the first place. To top it all off, they also use ai generation in their games. They aren’t JUST taking from a big company that isn’t hurt by it
Okay, that post had thousands of notes andyou didn’t link to the actual evidence, so I had to go digging:
So, what we’ve got here is this background:
From their next game which is apparently hollow-knight-esq, and its being said that it’s swiped from this:
It’s an underground ice cave with generic “tribal” banners.
I mean, they probably took inspiration, the game is a Hollow-Knight alike, after all. At most you could call it an homage. But plagiarism? I don’t think it comes within arm’s reach of that, not without more points of connection.
I’ve personally busted on them for not making their designs very distinct, but here’s the deal, any time there’s an IP lawsuit, more than just the case in question is at state. Precedent is at stake. And that precedent rarely shakes out in favor of the average artist.
If stuff with this level of similarity gets determined to be infringement, lots of homage and parody is suddenly on the chopping block, and a lot of fair use too.
Expys are a long-standing tradition, and because of the inherent stupidity of “Pokemon with guns”, they have a strong argument for the intent to parody.
But lets talk about the fakemon situations.
Here we’ve got Arsox and Flairees, a fakemon from Pokémon Sage.
So we’ve got fire-ungulates, a wooly ram and what appears to be a goat. A similar critter with a similar element is not enough to draw a connection, nor is a color shcheme, as russet-brown, cream, and orange is a basic fire colorscheme.
The two animals have entirely different distinctive features. Arsox leans heavy on the wool-as-fire thing, and has huge horns. Flairees has a lot of actual fur, and it’s distinctive traits are the helmet and the fire mane and tail. Similar foreheads, but again, they might have seen this, they might have come up with it entirely independently.
If I have 20 fan artists the job of doing a fire type sheep or goat pokemon, I bet I’d get at least 2 or 3 that would be similar enough to either of these to raise an eyebrow.
pyroaura98’s Mega Delphox is pretty eyebrow raising, at first. But I’m not super into pokemon, don’t know much past gen 3, so I looked up actual Delphox.
So.
Delphox is a girl fox with a design that evokes a witch (baggy sleeves, ‘skirt’, magic wand, the ear-flames are kinda like flowing hair).
I mean, it is possible someone at that japanese game studio saw that particular piece of Mega Delphox art and either intentionally swiped it or did so subconsciously.
None of us were in the room. But it’s also entirely possible that two different artists were looking to do a spin on Delphox, one intending to make a Mega form, the other looking to file off serial numbers while keeping it an expy, and came to the same very obvious decisions:
Swap the colors around. Intensify the saturation. Witch her up.
There’s only so many ways to make her witchier, and one of those is a giant hat.
However, one of the previous accusations of ripoffery, a fakemon by Pupeh on Twitter/X, and Hangyu, was similarly damning… until it was shown that Hangyu was in a trailer 2 years ago, and Pupeh made theirs in the last year.
Thing is, the process of creativity to create a transformative idea is the exact same one that makes “original” ideas. Both are only slightly divorced from the process of plagiarism. New ideas are the novel assemblage of old ones filtered through our perspective and experience.
If the idea is insufficiently novel compared to the one it’s drawn from, it’s plagiarism, if it’s sufficiently novel we call it transformative, and the less we’re aware of the influence, the more original we consider it. And the thing is, we associate certain ideas with each other, and those associations form webs and chains. If you’ve got two people with similar interests and similar tastes working on similar ideas, they’re going to follow similar paths of association.
DC’s Swamp Thing and Man-Thing never became a point of legal contention because they were both riffing on the Heap. A whole lot of the franchises you know and love have just as naked lifts as what Palworld’s got going.
I’m not here to defend Palworld. I think they flew too close to the sun in several areas. I’m just very concerned that this is not very strong evidence of actual plagiarism, and if that’s where the line is, a whole lot of parody, fair use, and homage is on the chopping block.
You don’t want the level of protectable concept to be as simple as “fire sheep/goat”
Also, semi-related, why do people keep making pokemon fan games?
You know they’re going to get shut down the second Nintendo or the Pokemon company hears about it. Your hard work and loving tribute to their franchise will be turned into lost media because you dared to try and give them free advertising.
Because Nintendo hates the idea of fanworks, and they don’t seem to keen on fans in general. They sent a dude to prison for essentially life for selling DRM workarounds, they will kill youtube channels for playing hacks of their games, they won’t take your tribute in the spirit it is offered.
You should be serial-number-filing your mon, Zelda, mario, and Metroid-likes from day one. It will give you a chance to actually build on your work and let your work survive for longer.
Look, I just saw the post I linked yesterday. I never heard of Palworld before that, I just thought that if people WERE plagiarizing from other games, it would be good to get that info out there. I personally have no knowledge of either side of this, so take it up with the person who made the original post instead
You thought it was better to spread the word before you looked into the veracity of the claims?
Well I saw Goody Prestminster at the Devil’s sabbath fortnight before last if that’s any interest.
What were YOU doing at the Devil’s sabbath to see them?
