Nintendo & The Pokémon Company are suing Palworld maker – Pocketpair responds

Nintendo has announced that they, alongside The Pokémon Company, are suing Palworld developer Pocketpair.

Update: Pocketpair has responded to the lawsuit, and states that they will fight back against Nintendo. Their statement is added to this story.

Citing patent infringement, the lawsuit is seeking an injunction and compensation for damages.

The lawsuit is coming around nine months after Palworld launched into Early Access at the start of 2024, become an instant smash hit thanks, in part, to the popular perception that it’s basically “Pokémon with guns”.

Nintendo’s statement reads:

Nintendo Co., Ltd. (HQ: Kyoto, Minami-ku, Japan; Representative Director and President: Shuntaro Furukawa, “Nintendo” hereafter), together with The Pokémon Company, filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the Tokyo District Court against Pocketpair, Inc. (HQ: 2-10-2 Higashigotanda, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo, “Defendant” hereafter) on September 18, 2024.

This lawsuit seeks an injunction against infringement and compensation for damages on the grounds that Palworld, a game developed and released by the Defendant, infringes multiple patent rights.

Nintendo will continue to take necessary actions against any infringement of its intellectual property rights including the Nintendo brand itself, to protect the intellectual properties it has worked hard to establish over the years.

They’re coming for Palworld and all it’s got, in other words.

Update: Pocketpair’s response reads.

We have received notice of this lawsuit and will begin the appropriate legal proceedings and investigations into the claims of patent infringement.

At this moment, we are unaware of the specific patents we are accused of infringing upon, and we have not been notified of such details.

Pocketpair is a small indie game company based in Tokyo. Our goal as a company has always been to create fun games. We will continue to pursue this goal because we know that our games bring joy to millions of gamers around the world. Palworld was a surprise success this year, both for gamers and for us. We were blown away by the amazing response to the game and have been working hard to make it even better for our fans. We will continue improving Palworld and strive to create a game that our fans can be proud of.

It is truly unfortunate that we will be forced to allocate significant time to matters unrelated to game development due to this lawsuit. However, we will do our utmost for our fans, and to ensure that indie game developers are not hindered or discouraged from pursuing their creative ideas.

It’s without a doubt that Palworld features a menagerie of rather derivative creature designs, with comparisons of 3D models by the gaming community bringing up the theory that Pocketpair had used Game Freak’s assets as base models and tweaked them. As a game experience, though, Palworld has a lot of rather different game mechanics in it alongside creature battling and capturing.

Back in January, all this speculation pushed The Pokémon Company to issue a statement that said, “We intend to investigate and take appropriate measures to address any acts that infringe on intellectual property rights related to the Pokémon.”

What’s particularly interesting is that they’re not going for copyright infringement, which would have suggested they thought Palworld copied Pokémon designs, but rather for infringing patents that Nintendo and The Pokémon Company hold. These would delve deep into the specific mechanics of Palworld, which game patents can cover, while an overarching genre cannot – similarly, there used to be a patent for including minigames in loading screens, and Warner Bros. holds a patent over the Nemesis System featured in the Shadows of Mordor game, preventing other developers from having a similar dynamic boss structure in their games.

As court documents start to emerge it will be fascinating to see what Nintendo’s lawyers pin Pocketpair with. Could it be Pal Spheres and capturing creatures a bit too similarly to Pokéballs?

Tags: Nintendo, Palworld, Pokemon, The Pokémon Company