Summary
- Stardew Valley was inspired by Harvest Moon, taking familiar elements and improving them.
- Nintendo’s lawsuit against Palworld for patent infringement may hurt creativity and competition.
- Nintendo has a long history of using its money and power to stifle developers and others in the industry.
Palworld was to Pokémon what Stardew Valley was to Harvest Moon. These games took basic gameplay elements that seemed like they shouldn’t be owned by any one group and improved the formula to make a better game.
Stardew Valley fans are lucky that Nintendo doesn’t actually own Harvest Moon because, given Nintendo’s Palworld lawsuits, their favorite farming sim might have run into trouble years ago.
Stardew Valley Was Inspired by Harvest Moon
The creation of Stardew Valley is closely tied to the Harvest Moon series, which has been around for a long time. The game’s developer, ConcernedApe, has said that Harvest Moon was a big inspiration for him. He loved the series’ cozy farm settings and the way it mixed farming with life simulation. However, he also felt that later Harvest Moon games weren’t as good as the older ones because they became less creative, gave players fewer choices, and forced them through long, boring tutorials.
The classic Harvest Moon experience is all about running a farm. Players had to grow crops, raise animals, and get to know the people in town. These games move slowly, letting players take their time to build up their farm. Later games started adding more restrictions, like forcing players to follow a set story or making them go through long tutorials before they could really play. Stardew Valley fixes many of these issues. It keeps the same basic farming mechanics but makes everything smoother and easier to use.
Stardew Valley also balances its pacing well, mixing slow farming with other fun activities like exploring, crafting, and talking to villagers. It also adds extra things to do, like fishing, mining, and fighting monsters. The farming sim has benefited from Stardew Valley. However, it’s arguable that the cozy sim genre owe its popularity to this indie hit.
Nintendo’s Trademark Lawsuit Against Palworld Speaks Volumes
Nintendo’s strong legal action against Pocketpair, the studio behind the monster-collecting game Palworld, shows how complicated and risky intellectual property protection can be in the video game industry. Stardew Valley received no lawsuit notices despite openly being inspired by Harvest Moon.
The lawsuit, which started in September 2024, wasn’t about copyright issues, it was about patent infringement. This is an important difference because Nintendo didn’t just go after obvious similarities in how characters or designs looked (which would be a copyright claim). Instead, it claimed that Palworld copied specific, patented game mechanics, like how monsters are caught and moved around.
Not many would think that basic gameplay mechanics like movement would be the issue. Instead of fighting Palworld, Nintendo is fighting every game that is close to Pokémon Legends because that’s the company’s venture into the 3D space. In my opinion, any company aggressively patenting basic gameplay ideas is bad for the gaming industry.
Nintendo’s case focused on the similarities between Palworld’s “Pal Spheres” and Pokémon’s Poké Balls and how players capture and interact with creatures. Nintendo argued that Palworld’s systems worked too much like Nintendo’s patented designs, making it an infringement.
Nintendo didn’t go after Cassette Beasts, a game that looks and acts far more like Pokémon than Palworld does. It went after Palworld, a very popular game that gave players the adult monster-catching game they wanted.
Nintendo chose to go after a successful franchise that could compete with its franchise, which reveals something about how the company thinks. In my opinion, it is less about stopping Palworld because of true infringement and more about making sure no one can enter a genre and compete with Pokémon.
Even Minecraft Wasn’t Completely Original
Minecraft was a huge success, but people often forget that its beginnings weren’t all that original, just like Stardew Valley. Even though it became a groundbreaking game, its development history shows clear inspiration from earlier games. This proves how smart changes and unique design choices can turn familiar ideas into something completely fresh.
Markus “Notch” Persson, the creator of Minecraft, has openly admitted where the original concept came from. One major influence was a 2009 multiplayer game called Infiniminer, which randomly generated worlds of blocks that players could destroy.
However, Minecraft wasn’t just a copy of Infiniminer. Minecraft’s brilliance came from taking Infiniminer’s basic ideas and expanding upon them, adding key changes that made the game feel entirely different. Unlike Infiniminer, which was focused on competitive multiplayer, Minecraft started as a single-player game that emphasized exploration and creativity. Persson also mixed in elements from other types of games, like role-playing progression and survival challenges, adding features that Infiniminer didn’t have, like the ability to host a server.
Minecraft can’t be played like Infiniminer, the same way Palworld can’t be played like Pokémon; they only look similar. It would be hard to imagine the Infiniminer creator suing Notch (if Infiniminer wasn’t open source) just because some aspects are similar or because the concept inspired Minecraft.
Competition Isn’t Bad Because Games Grow Through Imitation
The way video games develop over time is hardly ever a straight line of completely new ideas; Stardew Valley, Minecraft, SimCity, and more prove that. Instead, it’s more like a back-and-forth mix of copying and improving, where popular games often become the starting point for future ones.
Games like DOOM and Quake were groundbreaking in their time, but they set up basic mechanics that later games used as a foundation. Titles like Half-Life and Call of Duty took elements from those earlier games but added their own unique touches. Half-Life had story-driven gameplay, Call of Duty with its realistic military action and the rise of competitive online modes. Even though these games relied on existing ideas, they still managed to create their own style, making the shooter genre better.
This same pattern of borrowing and improving shows up in many types of games. Real-time strategy games, for instance, have changed a lot since Dune II first appeared. Later games like Command & Conquer and StarCraft kept the same basic RTS structure but added new features like different factions, high-tech units, and fresh gameplay twists. There are plenty of iconic games you didn’t realize were knockoffs.
Competition isn’t always a bad thing, it creates a cycle where developers take ideas from successful games, change them, and make them even stronger, is good for the industry. Unfortunately, Nintendo is huge and has used its power and connections to stifle competition before. To name a few examples listed from the Console Wars book by Blake J. Harris (one of the best books to learn the history of gaming):
- Nintendo required third-party developers to sign agreements that severely restricted the number of games they could release a year for the NES. This forced developers to prioritize Nintendo’s system over competing consoles, as they simply couldn’t afford to release the same volume of games elsewhere.
- Those same developers often had to agree not to release their games on other platforms (like Atari and later, Sega) for a certain period, giving Nintendo’s platforms a significant content advantage. Developers gained almost nothing from this, and developers agreed because…
- Nintendo was the sole manufacturer of NES cartridges, giving them significant control over supply. They could, and allegedly sometimes did, limit the number of cartridges available to developers who weren’t fully compliant with their demands.
- There have been allegations that Nintendo pressured retailers to give preferential shelf space to NES games and hardware, sometimes at the expense of competing systems.
- Do you wonder why Nintendo products never get cheap? Nintendo was accused of (and even settled a price-fixing lawsuit over) colluding with retailers to ensure consumers paid a certain price for its products, regardless of how well they sold.
Nintendo put in patents after Palworld was released, meaning Nintendo did not own those gameplay elements, which is a fishy thing to do when a game becomes competition with one of your biggest IPs. It shows how far Nintendo will go to protect any property from true competition.
I’ve named plenty of games that took basic elements and built upon them to form the industry we know today. If Stardew Valley or any of those games were scrutinized like this, they most likely would not have been made, or at the very least faced legal challenges that led to their shutdown.