Lawful Neutral: All the big MMO-related law stories from 2024, from Palworld to Blizzard

    
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2024 was another quiet year on the gaming legal front. I think various AI dramas and associated legislative hand-wringing sucked all the air out of the room. But that’s not to say that nothing happened in 2024. Most of the stories this year were about IP infringement in one way or another, with the biggest story being the Nintendo-Palworld suit. The inevitably exhausting eternal catfight between Epic, Apple and Google drags on with forward movement that makes the hokey-pokey look positively blazing. Blizzard surprisingly had a quiet year with lots of positivity flowing its way. It’s amazing what happens when you replace toxic leaders! 

Let’s dive deep on a couple of these stories, and then you’ll find the full legal roundup at the end! Happy 2025, y’all!

A wild Palworld appeared

If you had told me in 2023 that 2024 would kick off with a wildly successful monster-capture game that pissed off Nintendo, I probably would have responded with, “Yeah, that checks out.” Despite its huge popularity and mythical Mew-level franchise status, Pokémon video games have been floundering in recent generations. Baffling design decisions from The Pokémon Company (TPC) have kept the games stuck in game designs from decades ago. Gamers have been feeling a generation-over-generation dissatisfaction as TPC refuses to bring the Pokémon franchise to modern design sensibilities.

This sets the stage for the unexpected success of Palworld in January 2024. The hunger for a modern Pokémon-style game rocketed it to early success, as it sold millions of copies in the first few days after it hit early access. Even early on, armchair and expert legal analysts alike speculated whether Nintendo would let a game that had so publicly succeeded where it had failed stand without response. Turns out, no, it wasn’t willing to let it stand. Nintendo dispatched a PR-Pikachu to the peons below that roughly said, “We are not amused.

That was in January, and it took almost nine months for Nintendo to do anything – so long that people started to assume that Nintendo had wandered away. But it hadn’t. Instead of coming up with a copyright infringement suit as everyone expected, it filed a patent infringement lawsuit. Since copyright infringement seems like the “easy win” here, it’s fair to assume that the long delay between the threat of legal action and the actual legal action was Nintendo desperately trying to find a legal avenue.

The patents Nintendo is suing over are absurdly broad: “throwing a ball-shaped device to capture creates,” “aiming said device” and “riding creatures.” These patents were applied for and registered in Japan after the release of Palworld. In the US, there’s a good chance that a court would find these patents too broad to be enforceable, but since these are Japanese companies within the Japanese court system, it’s hard to say whether this suit has legs. This probably also played into Nintendo’s calculus on where it brought the suit; Nintendo clearly expects the Japanese court system to be sympathetic compared to other regions.

Nintendo is asking for just $66k USD in damages and an injunction against the release of Palworld. It’s not clear how far the injunction would apply – i.e., whether it would block sales in Japan or in the US as well – and it’s equally unclear what it would mean if the injunction were to happen, with several million people already playing the game. Given the small damages, I wonder if Nintendo intends to drop the injunction and instead just flex like a Machamp, saying, “See, I could have crushed you. Look at my magnanimity for allowing you to exist.”

It will be interesting to see what happens here in 2025, if anything. Either way, Nintendo, cementing its status as “Team Rocket,” is taking the wrong lesson from this experience.

Epic, Apple, and Google

This whole fight has started to feel like the school principal inexplicably gave three feuding tweens an assembly session to air their grievances, and now we’ve been here for four hours and they are still arguing. There was one development in 2024, though: the Supreme Court threw out both the appeals from Epic and Apple, effectively defaulting back to a “kinda-win” for Apple. I say kinda because although Apple doesn’t have to allow third-party payment processors, it does have to allow links and other things letting users know they can pay elsewhere on the web.

Then, in an outcome that was sure to stick in Tim Cook’s craw, the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) is forcing Apple to allow Epic’s Fortnite back onto to iPhones in the EU. It will be interesting to see how far the Brussels Effect spreads with the DMA as it ramps up. We can likely expect some global changes as a result of DMA, but Apple is petulant, so I’m sure it will try to find a way out of it.

Personally, I think the result here isn’t really the end for any of this. Apple is repeatedly digging in its heels to keep from interfacing with the rest of the tech ecosystem. I think this will be more and more problematic as more legislation comes out that requires greater interoperability and the ecosystem continues to “play better together.” Apple’s approach in hardware is floundering too and losing market share, and this isolationist tech position is only going to continue to hurt it, even though it’s probably too arrogant to admit it.

Oh, and Google is appealing the late 2023 decision from a jury that it did create a monopoly with its payment processor. Not much has happened with this case over the last year, but Google did get a stay on making changes to the Play Store, which were originally supposed to go into effect on November 1st.

Let me tell you, I am so excited for another year of people stanning multibillion corporations, while those same corporations continue to take turns screeching, “No really, I care about you the consumer. The other two corporations are evil incarnate.”

The Blizzard is… clearing?

The last few years have seen Activision-Blizzard dominating the legal news in MMOs for all the wrong reasons. But 2024 was remarkably quiet for the company, due in no small part to its new role under Microsoft, which apparently has a much lower tolerance for shenanigans than former ABK leadership.

Blizzard did have a few interesting cases crop up. First was a WTF-worthy discrimination lawsuit from a *checks notes* 57-year-old white executive who claimed he was being discriminated against for his age and race. His suit alleges such things as being passed over for a promotion in favor of a younger, non-white person, even after he was recommended by someone for the role. (As we all know, if a colleague recommends you for a job, you automatically get it. There’s absolutely no chance that another candidate is more qualified.) I especially love the part in the suit complaining that colleagues were “criticizing the plaintiff’s work to a point that his merit-based salary increase was hampered.” I looked for any update about the lawsuit since it was filed in January and there’s nothing, so maybe it’s fading into obscurity.

Activision was also sued for its supposed role in the Uvalde school shooting in 2022. The lawsuit alleges that Call of Duty “glorifies assault weapons” and comes coupled with lawsuits about targeted advertising at Meta and the actual gun manufacturer. Activision filed an anti-SLAPP response in December, arguing that the lawsuit was merely the “latest episode in a long series of failed attempts to censor violent entertainment.” The next hearing is slated for April 15th, but it probably won’t go anywhere; alleging that CoD glorifies assault weapons isn’t a strong case and likely will trip over First Amendment protections.

Finally, World of Warcraft formed its first wall-to-wall union, incorporating everyone involved in the design and development of the game. Finally, indeed!

We’ve got the whole list of legal stories from the year below, but it bears mentioning at least that Jagex is being sold again. But this time, it doesn’t look like there were any corporate shenanigans or executions involved, so there’s that.

Andy McAdams braves the swarms of buzzwords and esoteric legalese of the genre to bring you Massively OP’s Lawful Neutral column, an in-depth analysis of the legal and business issues facing MMOs. Have a topic you want to see covered? Shoot him an email!
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