The Pokémon Company has filed a lawsuit against a company called Pokémon Pty Ltd, which is working with a studio called Kotiota Studios. The Japanese company has sued them over an NFT-based game that is using their trademark Pokémon.
The game is based on the Nintendo IP, one of the most important and famous in the history of video games. The Australia-based company is facing the legal dispute, as it has no relationship with the current Pokémon Company.
But what are we talking about? Kotiota Studios, a company of Australian origin, has announced that it is preparing the launch of an NFT game called PokéWorld, in which the iconic pocket monsters from the Japanese animated series that moves billions of dollars appear.
Pokémon Pty Ltd has previously claimed that it has worked with the Pokémon Company in the past on some titles such as Pokemon Scarlet and PurplePokémon Home and also in the unpublished Pokémon Sleep.
The Web de PokéWorld is still online and The Pokémon Company is asking the court to intervene and stop the Australian company from infringing its trademarks, which can be found on its websites and social media. In other words, the Japanese they ask for a blockade whole of the game
NFTs, the refuge of games as speculation
For those who don’t know, these are games associated with cryptocurrencies and digital assets, known as NFTs. It is a novel concept that we are going to explain in simple words, so that everyone understands it.
NFT games have made many gamers millionaires. Some even get a monthly salary. But they are surrounded by controversy: experts dismiss them as wild speculation, high-risk products, which do not conform to conventional laws governing video games and full of scams.
And it is that NFT games are a derivative product of the technology behind cryptocurrencies. Hence, many companies are totally against it, such as Valve, which removed them from its Steam platform more than a year ago.
But we also see how giants of the size and importance of Ubisoft accommodate them, even though their projects end up ending in closures and money lost by users. We remember the great failure that Ubisoft Quartz was.
Hence his collapse and his difficult return
After the explosion of cryptocurrencies in 2020 and 2021, NFTs arrived as a technology associated with this type of business and the developers saw the opportunity to find business in a sector that was not natural for the blockchain.
As it happened with Bitcoin and other currenciesthe games that sold non-expendable tokens saw how millions of people put money to get figures, weapons, skins and other virtual elements of recognized or unknown video games. Everyone wanted in because the promise of the reward was immediate and highly beneficial.
But, like any speculative market, after reaching very high sums (There were NFTs that reached hundreds of thousands of euros), the market as a whole collapsed. In just two months, the NFT assets of the gaming world fell, on average, at 92% of its value. That is, they were no longer worth anything.
For this reasonmostly, All of the major players in the video game sector have withdrawn their NFT projects and offers. Since for image and status, keeping these NFTs in some of their titles blurred their public image.
NFTs flashed on and off, lucky for us? That time will tell.
