Nintendo files lawsuit against Palworld developer

Palworld

Nintendo has announced that they’ve filed a lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocket Pair.

In a brief announcement, Nintendo claims that Palworld “infringes multiple patent rights” held by Nintendo, though no examples are provided in the announcement.

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.

It’s foolish not to admit that Palworld is at least somewhat derivative of Pokemon, but until now Nintendo has only gone after modders (as usual) who added characters from the Nintendo Franchise into Palworld.

For its part, Palworld has seemed to distance itself from Pokemon and even during the game’s unprecedented success, fans insisted that while it may border parody, it doesn’t appear to lift anything directly from Pokemon. Fans are also confused as to why Nintendo waited so long to intervene, given that Palworld released about 8 months ago, and was announced 3 years ago. Fans have gone on to accuse Nintendo of cynically waiting until Pocket Pair made money off of Palworld to seek damages, or of the lawsuit being a petty tactic to compensate for the lack of quality mainline Pokemon games in recent years.

Palworld recently celebrated its success and announced that the game would not be pivoting to a free-to-lay or “games as a service” model, citing its rich singleplayer experience.

Palworld was released back in January 2024 for Windows PC (via Steam and the Microsoft Store), Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. The game has also been on Xbox Game Pass since day one.

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A basement-dwelling ogre, Brandon's a fan of indie games and slice of life anime. Has too many games and not enough time.


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