Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I ANAL and am not a lawyer.

The verbiage on this is RIDICULOUSLY specific (as patents generally should be) to the point that I refused to even pass the PDF through an OCR system and instead will trust that site's transcription

    (1) There must be a PC, console or other computing device and the game is stored on a drive or similar storage medium.

    (2) You can move a character in a virtual space.

    (3) You must be able to summon a character. They call it a “sub character” by which they mean it’s not the player character, but, for example, a little monster such as a Pokémon that the player character has at its disposal.

    Then the logic branches out, with items (4) and (5) being mutually exclusive scenarios, before reuniting again in item (6):

    (4) This is about summoning the “sub character” in a place where there already is another character that it will then (when instructed to do so) fight.

    (5) This alternative scenario is about summoning the “sub character” at a position where there is no other character to fight immediately.

    (6) This final step is about sending the “sub character” in a direction and then letting an automatic battle ensue with another character. It is not clear whether this is even needed if one previously executed step (4) where the “sub character” will basically be thrown at another character.

All of those criteria must be met for this trap card to be triggered (shit... Yugioh lawyers getting revved up now).

Step 4 specifically covers the case where you summon your little guy to fight someone else. As worded, that actually would impact a Summon in every JRPG and Final Fantasy just got sweaty. Step 5 summons a character as an assist or to replace the main character in a fight (so.. Pokemon).

What I find most interesting is that step 6 specifically says "automatic battle". Which... to my Not A Lawyer brain, means this doesn't even cover Pokemon since you specifically give your mons battle commands. Err, aside from S01E01 Pikachu who did not give a fuck. And then Charizard. And probably a dozen more pokemons after I stopped watching The Son Of Mr Mime's Adventures. But, from what little I saw of it, it DOES cover Palworld where you just summon your pals to do work for you or fight for you. And it potentially covers Final Fantasy and Ichiban's Like a Dragons (the Poundmates, not the Sujimon)...

Which is probably the most interesting thing and why I think Pokemon Co is going to be ridiculously selective of who they try to sue. Because any of the big hitters can just say "Dumbfucks, we were doing this before Game Freak even existed". Whereas indie devs are small enough they don't want to risk it.

It might be worth keeping an eye on MinnMax as Haley MacLean IS a lawyer who actually specializes in video game IP but I suspect this is too close to her day job for her to publicly speak about it even with the "not legal advice" disclaimers. Which hopefully guarantees she actually talked about it on one of the podcasts this week and I just haven't looked yet.