Twenty years ago, it wAs just a case of “gather up your current stock from sale and destroy it”. The gaming world is no stranger to these sorts of rights controversies - the first one that springs to mind is Formula 1 '97 where Bizarre Creations used Jacques Villeneuve’s likeness without permission, and the FIA logos were used in the boxart without authorisation from the FIA themselves. Psygnosis were ordered to pull all stock from sale - and they reissued a CD with WILLIAMS DRIVERONE as Damon Hill’s oppo and cleared the box of any logos that they didn’t have rights to.
These days, good question. I would imagine that any DRM free copy is still yours, but online play could be curtailed (problematic in a game like PalWorld), or worse still - your platform of choice could pull the authentication aspect of the game and prevent you from launching it, and fuck you in particular because it’ll be in the T&C’s that it’s a you problem and not a vendor problem.
Most likely though, nothing. The Pokémon Company and Nintendo aren’t exactly shy of litigation, and PalWorld has had it’s fair share of coverage to date. If they were going to fuck it over, I’m sure they would have done it by now.
Twenty years ago, it wAs just a case of “gather up your current stock from sale and destroy it”. The gaming world is no stranger to these sorts of rights controversies - the first one that springs to mind is Formula 1 '97 where Bizarre Creations used Jacques Villeneuve’s likeness without permission, and the FIA logos were used in the boxart without authorisation from the FIA themselves. Psygnosis were ordered to pull all stock from sale - and they reissued a CD with WILLIAMS DRIVERONE as Damon Hill’s oppo and cleared the box of any logos that they didn’t have rights to.
These days, good question. I would imagine that any DRM free copy is still yours, but online play could be curtailed (problematic in a game like PalWorld), or worse still - your platform of choice could pull the authentication aspect of the game and prevent you from launching it, and fuck you in particular because it’ll be in the T&C’s that it’s a you problem and not a vendor problem.
Most likely though, nothing. The Pokémon Company and Nintendo aren’t exactly shy of litigation, and PalWorld has had it’s fair share of coverage to date. If they were going to fuck it over, I’m sure they would have done it by now.