Police in Japan have arrested a 36-year-old man on suspicion of selling illegally modified Pokémon save data to customers online — a practice which is banned under the country’s 2019 Unfair Competition Prevention Act.
I don’t know what the implications of buying what he was selling are, but it’s possible that it functionally allowed players to cheat in multiplayer, which kind of ruins the experience of other players.
If it only affects a single-player game, on the other hand, I don’t really see a problem being caused.
I’d also add that I kind of feel that at least for this particular form, even if it is multiplayer cheating, while it’s probably not practical to mitigate every form of cheating in a multiplayer game, it’s probably possible to design the game in such a way that it can’t be attacked in this particular way.
They all have multiplayer; you can battle your Pokemon against each other. But they all, also, have exploitable bugs that make cheating without editing a save file easier since you don’t need external tools to execute them. If they were actually concerned about cheating, they’d fix the bugs first.
It’s not about cheating, it’s about making a profit. Nobody cares if you modify your save files (they do, there are ways they try to prevent that, especially in competitive multiplayer, but it’s not a legal issue). But once you start selling them, that’s when you’re officially in trouble.
So, I haven’t played Pokemon Violet, but looking at Wikipedia, it sounds like it’s got a multiplayer game mode:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokémon_Scarlet_and_Violet
I don’t know what the implications of buying what he was selling are, but it’s possible that it functionally allowed players to cheat in multiplayer, which kind of ruins the experience of other players.
If it only affects a single-player game, on the other hand, I don’t really see a problem being caused.
I’d also add that I kind of feel that at least for this particular form, even if it is multiplayer cheating, while it’s probably not practical to mitigate every form of cheating in a multiplayer game, it’s probably possible to design the game in such a way that it can’t be attacked in this particular way.
They all have multiplayer; you can battle your Pokemon against each other. But they all, also, have exploitable bugs that make cheating without editing a save file easier since you don’t need external tools to execute them. If they were actually concerned about cheating, they’d fix the bugs first.
Cheating in games isn’t illegal, though.
It’s not about cheating, it’s about making a profit. Nobody cares if you modify your save files (they do, there are ways they try to prevent that, especially in competitive multiplayer, but it’s not a legal issue). But once you start selling them, that’s when you’re officially in trouble.