Pocketpair has officially responded to the Palworld lawsuit filed in Japan by The Pokemon Company and Nintendo.
They shared this statement on Twitter:
“Yesterday, a lawsuit was filed against our company for patent infringement.
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.
We apologize to our fans and supporters for any worry or discomfort that this news has caused.
As always, thank you for your continued support of Palworld and Pocketpair.”
As Pocketpair alluded to, The Pokemon Company and Nintendo claims that Palworld “infringes multiple patent rights.” While it’s strange for Pocketpair to imply that they don’t know what IP rights they infringed, we are not going to even attempt to speculate on how copyright law and the Japanese criminal justice system works.
Pocketpair referring to themselves as a small indie game company is a claim that should invite scrutiny. The latest report we found states that they do have headcount of around 60 employees. But those 60 employees are not going to court to create the legal defense for their work against Nintendo’s lawyers. Pocketpair will find their own lawyers to do that.
And having sold 15 million units of Palworld on Steam, and 10 million units on Xbox, Pocketpair are more than capable of finding sufficient legal counsel. But we should already expect both sides of this lawsuit to try to win the public over. We will learn the details of the alleged patent infringement in time, and that will be the proper opportunity for the public to scrutinize the legal merits of this case.
Because you may not want to hear this, but Pocketpair and The Pokemon Company are about to bring their dispute to Japan’s courts. This won’t be a matter for the court of public opinion to decide on, even if we know fans are already picking sides.
