We finally know the patents at the center of a massive Nintendo lawsuit against Palworld maker Pocketpair, and they refer to patents specific to the Pokémon games.
When Nintendo announced that it had filed a lawsuit against Pocketpair over Palworld — aka “Pokémon with guns” — it did not reveal which patents were allegedly being infringed upon, and Pocketpair said it didn’t know either. However, there were some good educated guesses, like one that pertained to throwing a Poké Ball at a creature in a virtual world.
Pocketpair confirmed in a statement on Friday that there are three patents at the center of the lawsuit. Two are tied to this idea of throwing a Poké Ball and how that works in a video game, and one concerns another mechanic. These patents were all filed in Japan, but correspond to similar patents filed in the U.S. over the past few years.
To sum it all up, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company are suing Pocketpair over its system whereby a player throws an object in a virtual game world in a certain direction at a “battle character.” There’s also a patent listed for the technical aspects behind transitioning from riding a board or other object to walking on the ground. This latter one can refer to the bikes in Pokémon games but, as it shows in the patent, it may pertain to riding a Pokémon.
Here are summaries and links to the patents if you’re interested in the full details:
Pocketpair also revealed that the injunction calls for 10 million yen: 5 million paid out to Nintendo and 5 million paid out to The Pokémon Company. “We will continue to assert our position in this case through future legal proceedings,” Pocketpair said in a statement.
Despite the lawsuit, Palworld and Pocketpair are still business as usual. Not only has Palworld hit PlayStation 5 (even in Japan, where the case has been filed), but Krafton announced a deal to bring Palworld to mobile.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
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