Nintendo and The Pokémon Company has made some new moves that may or may not be connected to their legal actions vs. Palworld.
Last November 2024, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company announced they were suing Pocketpair and their game, Palworld, for patent infringement in Japan. We would later confirm that the patents in question are related to game mechanics involving how players captured their Pokémon, and how it closely resembled how players caught their Pals in Palworld.
As reported by GoNintendo, today the USPTO revealed that they approved a new patent filed by Nintendo and The Pokémon Company. In their words;
“This is patent No. 12,220,638 and relates once again to capturing characters, aiming points, indications of the likelihood of successfully capturing a virtual character, and how to display the captured character and another virtual character starting to fight.”
They had previously filed 23 other patents related to Pokémon monster catching mechanics in the US, and only one got approved. These patents seem to be similar or related to the patents that the companies are now bringing up in their litigation in Japan. The obvious assumption here is that Nintendo and The Pokémon Company intend to use these patents to also file a lawsuit vs. Pocketpair in the US, but things are a lot less black and white here as fans think.
As we had previously covered, while many gamers in the West sided with Pocketpair, Japanese fans turned against them, including no less than the creator of the Touhou Project video game series, ZUN. As it turned out, the studio had earned a bad reputation for itself in its home country, and it certainly looks like Pocketpair didn’t expect that reaction.
We reported on a YouTuber who helped explain the differences in how US and Japan saw this further. As it turns out, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company did not file the same lawsuits in the US and Japan because the intellectual property laws in the two countries are completely different. We would not be surprised if Palworld ends up receiving copyright and trademark lawsuits in the US instead of patent lawsuits. In any case, we think these new patents aren’t necessarily for new lawsuits in the US, as much as they are to strengthen their case in Japan.
But there are other moving parts to this story that are technically out of the legal sphere, and many Pokémon and Palworld fans may not know about yet. Because as strange as this may sound, Pocketpair recently published their first game on Nintendo Switch. The company also recently made it clear that they were not interested in being drawn into the console wars. In fact, they recently started a new venture as a publisher, with their first studio partner being Tales of Kenzara developer Surgent Studios.
These are not the actions of a company who’s decided to proverbially ‘wage war’ against their peers in public and the court of law. What you’re looking for is things like Epic Games’ Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite ad. Subsequently, what position are we supposed to assume Nintendo has taken if they’ve accepted a game from the same company they’re suing?
We’re not really sure how these legal actions are going to play out, and we do want to bring this point up. If Pocketpair is trying to negotiate a settlement with Nintendo and The Pokémon Company, none of the parties involved would be able to talk about it. At least not until the settlement has actually been finalized. If a lawsuit will continue, even if Nintendo’s name would have to stay attached to it, it would more likely be The Pokémon Company who is seeking to pursue it. And who knows? They may have good reason to file such cases, that we won’t know for sure until, and only if, this makes it to the courts.
For now, we can only wait for more updates on what’s going to happen next in this case in Japan’s courts.
