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[VGC] Palworld embroiled in AI and Pokémon ‘plagiarism’ controversy
- Thread starter Red Kong XIX
- Start date
It's amazing how when people clamor for good faith discussion they only apply it to one side.
ya that's the only thing been brought up. it's not death by a thousand creatively bankrupt cuts or anything
And? They haven't brought receipts about AI Art being used in the game. To do what they have done they don't need to use AI Art at all they straight up modify models as they go. If they use AI art it would very obviously have appeared in the UI and talent trees yet it hasn't. CEO's say shit all the time doesn't mean it happens heaps of developers and publishers have shown interest in generative AI Art yet we don't jump to the assumption that everyone else games use it. Plagiarism argument is THE argument here AI argument is just noise that can be used to dismiss the real issue here.
They probably wont. If it was the case we would have thread like this going forward about every. single. Square Enix release going forward because hey the CEO said they are doing it so literally every studio under them must be using it.
You have to be patient. im am 100% certain they will show us some concept art. You really just need to give them time to create it, I mean it's alot of work. But I'm sure once hats done then they will show it for sure. Al things in due time
I don't think there's anything innately weird about concept art not being posted, there are a bunch of games where concept art is hard to find. But when you have something like a monster collection game in the internet age, having the character designs become popular and having people spread them around is vital to its success. So it might be a little weird when they're going "check out all the Pals in this game you can collect!" and then you go to the wiki and they don't even have a picture of them because they haven't pushed them forward. At the very least you'd probably want to spread awareness of your mascot character since need fans to grab onto that one.
Gacha games are also all about collecting your favourite characters, and you're probably going to see their assets plastered all over the place because they're either made available and or they include them in some way that makes them easy to grab. Like if I just pop open some of the gacha games I have on my phone and see if I can find images online of the things they're trying to sell me:
Super Robot Wars DD
Iron Saga
Medarot S
I don't need to know these things are there in advance, I can just reasonably assume that they're going to be pushed forward because it makes sense for them to be.
Gacha games are also all about collecting your favourite characters, and you're probably going to see their assets plastered all over the place because they're either made available and or they include them in some way that makes them easy to grab. Like if I just pop open some of the gacha games I have on my phone and see if I can find images online of the things they're trying to sell me:
Super Robot Wars DD
Iron Saga
Medarot S
I don't need to know these things are there in advance, I can just reasonably assume that they're going to be pushed forward because it makes sense for them to be.
The AI art thing is circumstantial character evidence about the values of the ceo, and by proxy the company. In and of itself it's not indicative of a greater crime, but it's a testament to the character of the ceo and company, and that in turn is evidence on the issue of plagiarism. If someone has stolen before, and says they'd like to steal again in the future, both are kind of relevant when discussing whether he stole right now
No need to wait on them, I'll just go to Bulbapedia instead. Pretty sure it's all there.
Gamers will throw artists under the bus.
That's kinda their thing. Not gonna lie, I'm interested in playing that witch game. Mainly because it's not a gameplay clone.
But the art for Hollow Knight was a very big part of its development and identity.
Team Cherry are a three man company and they spent alot of time creating that very distinct art style. I honestly feel like stealing their art style is just as bad if not worse than Palworld.
Even if the game plays different it is still not ok
This is why the insinuations I've seen around online that Palworld's success is somehow an anti-capitalist win because they hit out at TPC holds no water. Pocket Pair will theft from anyone for profit, which wraps around to them being just as capitalist as TPC.
Honestly feel bad for the Hollow Knight devs, Silksong isn't even out and already there's a game with a lookalike art style ready to steal its thunder because the CEO is more interested in riding other people's coattails than anything else.
It's not, just refuting the absolutely insane notion that developers don't post concept or WIP pre-release of their early access game. That's like, such a standard practice that thing to argue otherwise would be an exercise in failed gaslighting. Which tbh, failed gaslighting is another tech bro staple.
I'm still wondering if people are having the Wooloo pulled over their eyes because Pocket Pair isn't just committing art theft from Pokémon, they're doing it on a James Somerton scale from multiple sources. There's a lot of creatures that seem original... if you have only ever played Pokémon. Number 61 is Nine-Tailed Fox from Rune Factory 5. Number 11 is part Prinny from Disgaea. I'm pretty sure at this point that all 111 creatures use stolen/traced art assets.
I am kind of dying to know what game they pulled all the cute little Pal clothes, gems, and accessories from. Then again, I did invest like 40 hours into Moco Moco Friends that one time.
I am kind of dying to know what game they pulled all the cute little Pal clothes, gems, and accessories from. Then again, I did invest like 40 hours into Moco Moco Friends that one time.
For starters, both the pal and Gyarados are sea dragons, Chimchar is a moneky well Coronamon is a LION!To me the picture you quoted has the same amount of similarities as these two, the only difference being that Palworld gets critique for this:
That is true. I don't care who got inspired by whom first. My whole point from the beginning was that it's impossible to make a Pokemon like game in the same or similar visual style without having any overlap in the designs.
Depends on how well it's regulated, so my hopes aren't high. Even the generative AI feature of photoshop weirds me out
Is Palworld actually any good? Of course not
Eurogamer's thoughts on Palworld, which are in brief: it's not great.
www.eurogamer.net
Well, one video game journalist has a pretty harsh review of it. I wonder how many angry people are in the comments, hopefully no death threats.
As far as I can tell (using Steam v0.1.2.0) there's no reference to Pokemon in the Chinese translations. Below are the Simplified and Traditional Chinese texts that pop up once you've caught a 6th Pal and they both use the same characters to represent "Pal" - 帕鲁. Google translates this as Palu which seems to just be a phonetic translation.
View: https://i.imgur.com/1UQIt9X.png
Given that Xbox/Gamepass are still on an earlier version (v0.1.0.0 at launch and v0.1.1.0 as of today), there's still a chance this is real, but that tweet is the only mention I've seen of this since launch and I can't imagine people staying quiet about a find like this.
It's a bummer to see more of these, but honestly this isn't even the worst Hollow Knight ripoff I've seen this week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5C_EMrBmKM
I think it's more the opposite. Pals often feature design elements from Pokemon, but they're sometimes not intuitive, like how they seem to have taken Empoleon's crown beak/crest and placed something very similar on the forehead of an alpaca... for some reason. I don't get why the emperor penguin joke would be applied to an alpaca. They apparently don't even have an evolution mechanic even though several Pals like Kingpaca seem to be designed as evolved forms. But the idea of plagiarism is ultimately that you want to take someone else's success, as opposed to a reference where you want people to know and appreciate what you're basing your work on, so there's absolutely no reason why the Palworld devs would be compelled to make it obvious every time that they're ripping of Pokemon.
But because the plagiarism is so flagrant and being a ripoff of Pokemon is so much a part of Palworld's identity, it primes people into the expectation that everything about Palworld is going to be a ripoff, and that leads to some comparisons which are weaker when taken in a vacuum. Things like kitsune and East Asian dragons have been depicted for at least a thousand years, and have many traditional elements in their depiction, so there's nothing wrong with two developers both visiting that motif and it's true that there are going to be similarities when they do. So the similarity is obvious and easy to point out, but using it as a case for a ripoff is relatively forced compared to some harder to find ones.
Having those weaker comparisons then gives those contrarians or Palworld diehards or whoever it is that wants to deny the plagiarism the allegations fuel to go "hey, this comparison is weak, they must all be weak" when the reason why people are grasping at any possible connection is because the theft is so apparent.
Is Palworld actually any good? Of course not
Eurogamer's thoughts on Palworld, which are in brief: it's not great.
Well, one video game journalist has a pretty harsh review of it. I wonder how many angry people are in the comments, hopefully no death threats.
That part about it feeling like a product to be sold rather than to be played cuts deep.
I feel like Palworld has opened the floodgates or something. This shit was posted 4 days ago, what the fuck.
A hat that lets you possess enemies? Where have I seen that before?
If it was James Somerton level they would have taken an actual pokemon game, split half a region from one and the second half from another, put them in the wrong gym leader order and pass it off as their own new game.
They took existing meshes to use as a base instead of building models from scratch.
The whole thing about concept art is that it's not meant to be its own argument. It's simply another piece of circumstantial evidence that, when taken in context with everything else that's been shown and revealed, supports the notion that some amount of plagiarism took place. After all, you don't need concept art if you're just taking and remixing other people's existing designs and 3D models in a way that (you hope) makes them legally distinct.
Given the size of the team and the amount of content, the corners had to be cut somewhere -- the only questions are where and how.
It's because decision makers in the gaming space want generative AI to become an effective way to automate production and reduce labor costs -- and everyone knows that means plagiarism. The notion of chopping up existing Pokemon, and sticking them back together in ways that are weirdly inconsistent to actual humans familiar with the source material, feels very much like what an AI would do -- because that's what it does with 2D art. However, that doesn't rule out that a human did the same thing the old-fashioned way.
The usage (or not) of AI is basically irrelevant to the actual question of whether or not there was plagiarism.
While it might be fun to speculate about whether or not generative AI even exists to meet the very specific requirements of this project, it ultimately does not matter. The CEO being onboard for AI (and featuring it prominently in a previous title) does not necessarily mean that it was used for this project, and I don't think there's enough evidence to definitively say one way or the other.
It's the sort of thing that could be clarified during discovery in a U.S. trial ... but given that Nintendo and Pocket Pair are based in Japan, chances are any trial would happen under Japanese jurisdiction, and I have no idea how that would work.
The guy says it's a game to be sold, and you'll feel like a mark having bought it. Yet his Twitter profile shows he is a fan of Pokémon which forces you to buy each game twice to make sure you get access to all the Pokémon.Is Palworld actually any good? Of course not
Eurogamer's thoughts on Palworld, which are in brief: it's not great.
Well, one video game journalist has a pretty harsh review of it. I wonder how many angry people are in the comments, hopefully no death threats.
Or you can just… trade. A core mechanic of the series. Like, I get your point, but this is just whataboutism.
What a hilarious whataboutism. Pokemon never forced anyone to buy both versions, even when online trading didn't exist
That's never been a requirement since the online trade system was brought to the games.
sold from whose perspective tho
i cant sell my steam library send help
From the perspective of the game maker. "A game made to be sold" is a sentence I have never heard used to describe a game before. Especially as a pejorative.
Goddamn, he completely shat on this game. Lol.Is Palworld actually any good? Of course not
Eurogamer's thoughts on Palworld, which are in brief: it's not great.
Well, one video game journalist has a pretty harsh review of it. I wonder how many angry people are in the comments, hopefully no death threats.
sorry i meant to type 'nice avatar' not 'sold from whose perspective tho'
wrong button
It would've been a little more biting if he clearly played more than 30 minutes lol yes it looks lifeless and unoriginal, yes the creatures ragdoll when you kill them
Pretty odd review, but I'll give them credit: they properly quoted the game director, unlike many posters who keep shamelessly distorting the quote ("he said he loves stealing and he encourages his employees to steal!") to make it sound a lot worse. Here's the quote:
Square Enix literally release art books for their games - what are you talking about?
There are obv a couple that look like animals (the wolf in particular), but if the pokemon looks like a bipedal blob with a flower on its head, what kinda animal is that based on that would necessitate copying this exact style? lol
Especially since we have images being passed around with dozens of extremely similiar designs and only a tiny amount of which modeled after a real animal.
The whole "it's a game to be sold" criticism is absolutely terrible. That could be used for every game. Pokemon is a game that's made to be sold. Arguably one of the biggest and best examples of that. If that's really a bad thing he should use that in all of his upcoming articles
It was just a matter of time to have someone openly supporting genAI. And he's apparently making ton's of money too. Guess others will follow.
Always thought the best way to avoid a potential PR shitstorm is... Not answering at all.
Now I can see if it really works.
I think what the author is trying to say - and it is somewhat sloppy language, to be sure - is that while all games are products, some games feel more like products than others. The connotation is basically what plenty of folks here have noted: the game feels cynical, like it exists entirely to capitalize on popular ideas. A theory which is somewhat reinforced by the CEO quite literally saying that he would rather jump on trends than be original.
Does this really portend a change in CEO morality, though? I guess I just don't see the precedent being set. Several (gaming) CEOs are already all aboard for AI, including generative AI, especially if it means getting to lay people off. Being for trend chasing? Well, maybe it's not openly stated as often. Welcome to the cynicism of commercial game development.
But I think anything people are worried about is (and has been) the case for a while now already.