Nintendo and Pokémon Company sue Palworld maker Pocket Pair for patent infringement

Nintendo and The Pokémon Company sued Palworld maker Pocket Pair for patent infringement today, according to a filing by Nintendo.

The surprise might be more about how long it took for this to happen, as Palworld, which generated more than 25 million downloads earlier this year, was always nicknamed “Pokémon with Guns.”

Nintendo said the 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. We have asked Pocket Pair for comment.

We haven’t seen the details of the lawsuit yet. But the question will address an important legal point of where the line is when it comes to copying something versus being inspired to create a legally protected variant of a game. For instance, there are lots of real-time strategy games in the market, and no single game company owns a patent on RPG games. Even so, no game company is allowed to directly copy art work and other elements of somebody else’s RPG game. I did a panel on this at Devcom in Germany recently, mostly with respect to copyright and AI.

The art work for some of the Palworld characters looks very similar to Pokémon characters. But Pokémon is not a violent shooter or survival game. What percentage of the art has to be the same before a court will declare infringement? We’ll probably find out.

Meanwhile, The Pokémon Company did win this lawsuit on copyright infringement. However, as noted, this is a patent-infringement lawsuit.

In a statement today, Pocket Pair said:

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 Pocket Pair.Pocket Pair