There are many games that had that mechanic before Arceus.
In particular, Craftopia (which is from the same developers of Palworld) had capsule devices that you can throw to enemies in a “virtual space” while characters “engage in combat” before Arceus was a thing.
Just because they wrote a patent does not make it enforceable… patents don’t really mean anything until they are actually tested in court so they are just tools to try and scare people away whenever a company wants to bully with the prospect of a lawsuit.
I feel that Palworld is likely to win this, this actually is an idiotic move from Nintendo and a win for Palworld… now they will get more publicity, perhaps another spike in sales, and they are finally given the opportunity to prove how they are in the right, so they can shut up all the naysayers who complained about it. I’m hoping all the paranoic empty claims about “blatant asset theft” will be settled once and for all.
Yeah, it protects Jimmy from having to unconditionally contribute to society & its many organizations.
It allows Jimmy to set conditions and control who can use it and who cannot. For example, he can ally with one particular big corpo (or even start building one himself) so they can hold that thing hostage and require agreements/fees for the use of that thing for a long long time.
So now, instead of all people, including big (and small) corpos, having free access to the idea, only the friends of Jimmy will.
The reality is that if it wasn’t for Jimmy, it’s likely that Tommy would have invented it himself anyway at some point (and even improved on it!). But now Tommy can’t work on the thing, cos Jimmy doesn’t wanna be his friend.
So not only does it protect Jimmy from having to contribute to society without conditions, it also protects society from improving over what Jimmy decided to allow (some) people access to. No competition against Jimmy allowed! :D
Even without patents, if the invention is useful I doubt the inventor will have problems making money. It would be one hell of a thing to have in their portfolio / CV. Many corpos are likely to want Jimmy in their workforce. Of course, he might not become filthy rich… but did Jimmy really deserve to be that much more richer than Tommy?