Palworld was officially revealed to be available on the PlayStation 5 in the latest State of Play presentation. But it’s actually not available on PlayStation 5 everywhere.
As reported by The Verge, Palworld has yet to be released to the PlayStation 5 in Japan. The official Japanese Palworld account stated that the release date has not been decided, without providing an explanation.
But we can guess why this happened. Days before the State of Play event, The Pokemon Company and Nintendo filed a lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair. The lawsuit alleges that Palworld is guilty of patent infringement, but the patents in contention have yet to be made public.
So it is easy to hypothesize that Sony held off on allowing Palworld to release on their platform in Japan, because of this lawsuit. Sony may be pre-empting the possibility that PlayStation will be drawn into the lawsuit, if they published the game after the public notice for the lawsuit.
It certainly looks like Sony got caught in a bad position in this situation. A few months before, Sony Music and Aniplex formed a new joint venture with Pocketpair. Sony Music also owns animation company Aniplex, so Sony may be moving to make a Palworld anime, complete with soundtrack.
So it’s possible that Sony exposed themselves to liability when they signed onto that joint venture all the way back last July. We should clarify that Sony Music is a separate division from PlayStation, and that may be relevant on how much they could be drawn into the Palworld lawsuit.
There are certainly some gamers who speculated that Sony would hold back on publishing Palworld on PlayStation 5 because of the lawsuit. They may believe that holding off releasing the game only in Japan could keep them safe from the lawsuit. Of course, we won’t speculate on this, or other details on the lawsuit, since the details have yet to be made public.
There is one possible explanation, outside of Sony’s business dealings and The Pokemon Company’s legal actions. As we reported, Japanese fans and even game developers seem to dislike Pocketpair, siding with Nintendo and The Pokemon Company over them.
Sony is known to have mostly abandoned the Japanese console market to Nintendo anyway. So perhaps they have no plans to bring the game to the PlayStation 5 in Japan at all? Sony isn’t exactly popular in Japan for the exorbitant prices PlayStation products have been going up to anyway. And this is not even the only time this year where Sony dabbled with their popularity with consumers in some countries, knowing they would make money somewhere else.
