Nintendo, The Pokemon Company sue Palworld maker Pocketpair

Nintendo and The Pokemon Company announced they have filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Pocketpair, the makers of the heavily Pokémon-inspired Palworld. The Tokyo District Court lawsuit seeks an injunction and damages “on the grounds that Palworld infringes multiple patent rights” according to the announcement.

“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,” the company writes.

The many surface similarities between Pokémon and Palworld are readily apparent, even though Pocketpair’s game adds many new features over Nintendo’s (such as, uh, guns). But making legal hay over even heavy common ground between games can be an uphill battle. That’s because copyright law (at least in the US) generally doesn’t apply to a game’s mere design elements, and only extends to “expressive elements” such as art, character design, and music.
Generally, even blatant rip-offs of successful games are able to make just enough changes to those “expressive” portions to avoid any legal trouble. But Palworld might clear the high legal bar for infringement if the game’s 3D character models were indeed lifted almost wholesale from actual Pokémon game files, as some observers have been alleging since January.

What patent are we talking about?

Beyond mere copyright concerns, though, Nintendo’s lawsuit announcement specifically alleges patent infringement on the part of Palworld (though this difference could come down to vagaries of translation from the original Japanese). A lawsuit over patents would seemingly require some unique game mechanic or feature that has been specifically granted stronger protections by the patent office. While the Pokémon Company does hold a number of (US) patents, most of them seem to deal with various server communications methods or the sleep monitoring capabilities of Pokémon Sleep.

“Palworld is such a different type of game from Pokémon, it’s hard to imagine what patents (*not* copyrights) might have been even plausibly infringed,” game industry attorney Richard Hoeg posted on social media Wednesday night. “Initial gut reaction is Nintendo may be reaching.”

PocketPair CEO Takuro Mizobe told Automaton Media in January that the game had “cleared legal reviews” and that “we have absolutely no intention of infringing upon the intellectual property of other companies.”

Shortly after Palworld became a viral mega-hit on Steam in January, Nintendo said that it would “investigate and take appropriate measures” against “another [then-unnamed] company’s game released in January 2024.” Those measures are now moving forward even as Palworld‘s initial burst of popularity has given way to more modest player numbers in recent months.