Nintendo vs Pocketpair Lawsuit Still Reverberates Through the Industry

The ongoing patent infringement filed in the Tokyo District court in September 2024 by Nintendo and its subsidiary The Pokémon Company against Pocketpair, Inc is still going strong with no end in sight due to a recent update to the wording of one of Nintendo’s patents, and despite changes made to the defendant’s game Palworld.

When the suit was filed, Nintendo asked for ¥10 million (approximately  $65,000), plus late fees in monetary damages. The patent infringements claimed involve three specific game mechanics in Palworld: catching creatures by throwing a device, and the ability to switch between ridden creatures mid-action. The third infringement is a bit more vague and simply states “related capturing mechanic variations.”

“It is truly unfortunate that we will be forced to allocate significant time to matters unrelated to game development due to this lawsuit,” Nintendo said in a statement after filing the lawsuit.

All three patent infringements are based on patents Nintendo applied for and got approved after Palworld was released in January 2024.

Pocketpairs Defence – Retroactively Changing Palworld

Pocketpairs is retroactively making changes to Palworld while the lawsuit is ongoing in an attempt to make sure that the Tokyo District court will not have any patent infringement to rule on when it comes to it.

In May this year, Pocketpair removed the possibility of players flying on creatures in the game even though this feature was part of a demo shown in June 2021 two and a half years before the game was released. In its current state, players have to equip a glider rather than a Pal, which instead provides a passive buff to the glider.

Catching creatures in the game by throwing a device at them was changed already in November 2024 to simply summoning them. Whether this will be deemed as a variation of capturing a creature will be up for the court to decide.

Nintendo’s Response – Retroactively Rewording One of Its Patents

Earlier this month, Nintendo – which originally found that it was unfortunate to be spending time on this court case rather than developing games – decided to re-word its patent involving the ride-switching mechanic which originally was specific to boarding and flying a character, and not equipping an item, like a glider, to basically say “even when” a character is riding in the air – it should be covered by the patent.

Meaning that riding a Pal or a glider wouldn’t make any difference, which was the point to begin with. However, according to Japanese patent laws, it’s perfectly legal to submit applications for rewording an existing patent during an ongoing court case as long as it does not change the original concept or presents a new one.

Japanese lawyer Ryo Arashida pointed out the irony of Nintendo’s initial patent application on X (Twitter) which only included boardable characters and not equipment.

“For this reason, claiming in the lawsuit that a ‘Glider’ (equipment) is a ‘boardable character’ would create a contradiction,” he said in a post.

Applying strategies that involve retroactive changes is nothing new for Nintendo. Before the Switch 2 was released in June this year, the initial batch of consoles available during the pre-order phase in April were sold out almost immediately in the US, Europe, and Japan.

The following month Nintendo updated its EULA to say that the company reserves the right to remotely turn off Switch 2 consoles permanently if any rules are violated, effectively turning consoles into paperweights.

Gotta Sue ‘Em All

Palworld is far from the only game that is visually and mechanically inspired by Pokémon, but it is arguably the most successful and the only one being taken to court. Following its initial success and being dubbed “Pokémon with guns,” Palworld quickly rose to popularity and peaked at 2.1 million players, according to SteamDB, shortly after the game was released.

Temtem is another monster capturing game with striking resemblance to Pokémon. This game was created by Spanish indie dev company Crema and released back in September 2022 by San Francisco-based Humble Games.

If Nintendo wins the case against Palworld, it could open up the floodgates for an endless stream of lawsuits against hundreds of games with Temtem, Nexomon, and Monster Sanctuary likely being the first three in line.