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Earlier this week, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company, of which it’s a part owner, announced they were suing the maker of Palworld, a survival crafting MMO that blew up earlier this year on Steam and Xbox. The companies accused Pocketpair, the studio behind the overnight “Pokémon with guns” sensation, of patent infringement. While neither party has disclosed exactly what elements Palworld is accused of copying, experts have started weighing in on the Pokémon mechanics that could be at the heart of the dispute.
“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 announced on September 18. Pocketpair responded the next day. “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,” it wrote. “It is truly unfortunate that we will be forced to allocate significant time to matters unrelated to game development due to this lawsuit.”
It could be weeks before the exact allegations of patent infringement are outlined by Nintendo in subsequent filings, but in the meantime, new reporting and analysis has started to shed some light on what the company’s main line of legal attack might be, and why it’s decided to go after Pocketpair in the first place. While the early online controversy around Palworld’s similarity to Pokémon had to do with its creature designs, the lawsuit that Nintendo has filed eight months later is about what players actually do in the game.
One of those things is throwing a spherical object at fantastical creatures to capture them and store them inside. Nintendo has a patent for a version of that mechanic, as recently reported by Game File. Delving into the details, Polygon broke out the precise language of what that patent, which was filed in 2021 and approved just last year, specifically covers:
In a first mode, an aiming direction in a virtual space is determined based on a second operation input, and a player character is caused to launch, in the aiming direction, an item that affects a field character disposed on a field in the virtual space, based on a third operation input. In a second mode, the aiming direction is determined, based on the second operation input, and the player character is caused to launch, in the aiming direction, a fighting character that fights based on the third operation input.
As you can see, it’s not merely throwing one thing at another thing to capture it inside, but a specific sequence of events based on particular inputs. We still don’t know if this is one of the actual patents involved in Nintendo’s lawsuit, or what a court will decide if it is. (The case was filed in Japan.) But if it is, the timing could narrowly work out in the Mario maker’s favor. Why was the patent so recent given that Pokémon has been around for decades? Probably because it wasn’t until 2022’s Pokémon Legends: Arceus that a game actually contained players capturing Pokémon with Pokéballs in 3D spaces like this.
Japanese patent attorney Kiyoshi Kurihara recently told Yahoo Japan, according to a translation by Automaton West, that Nintendo and The Pokémon Company filed subsequent “divisional” patents based on the above one earlier this year and asked for the review to be accelerated, with approval on one of them coming just last month. Kurihara suggested this may have been part of a strategy to button up its patent language ahead of pursuing legal action against Pocketpair for infringement.
This isn’t the first time Nintendo has gone after another Japanese video game company for patent infringement. Back in 2017, it went after mobile studio Colopl for its Japanese smartphone game White Cat Project for alleged patent violations related to “special technology used to operate a joystick over a touch panel.” The two sides eventually reached a settlement, with Colopl paying Nintendo roughly $20 million. Industry analyst Serkan Toto, who leads the consulting firm Kantan Games, pointed to this example in an interview this week with 404 Media.
“So first of all this lawsuit is filed under Japanese law, so it has nothing to do with the U.S., nothing to do with the UK or EU law at all,” he said. “And second point is that I think that Nintendo took its time to really build the case, map everything out, including counter arguments that the other side might bring up in a lawsuit, and how to counter them and make absolutely sure that they think they will win before filing the lawsuit.”
Toto painted a somewhat dire picture of Pocketpair’s likely chances of prevailing against Nintendo given its track record, and suggested that the timing of the lawsuit might be connected to Tokyo Game Show. Pocketpair was expected to announce a PlayStation 5 version of Palworld there months after partnering with Sony on a joint venture to expand the IP and merchandize it. Sony has declined to comment on the lawsuit so far.
“You can bet your life that Nintendo hates this company, and they couldn’t find an angle with the character designs,” Toto said. “This is why they are not mentioned in their press release. So they come with these technical peculiarities.” He added that he thinks the goal is to hurt Pocketpair financially. It’s unclear exactly how much the game has made so far, but it had already reached 19 million players shortly after coming out, including through Game Pass as part of a deal with Microsoft.
We’ll see what eventually comes out once Nintendo makes its case against Pocketpair public. In the meantime, the company is keeping its cards close to its vest. “We filed the lawsuit at this timing after careful investigation of the content that is the subject of this lawsuit,” it said in a statement. “We will refrain from commenting on topics that relate to the content of the lawsuit.”
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