(Opinion) Palworld Is Being Sued by Nintendo… For Patent Infringement???

We all knew this was coming, right? Some called it the Pokémon killer, others said it was nothing more than a blatant rip-off filled with stolen assets, and now Nintendo is speaking. On September 18th, 2024, Nintendo filed a lawsuit against fellow Japanese company Pocketpair, creator of Palworld. This lawsuit alleges the violation of many of Nintendo’s patents, however as of the writing of this article, the specific patents violated are not known. As it was with the launch of the game, many on social media are crying hysteria in both directions. Horror just another misplaced Nintendo lawsuit against an innocent 3rd party, or perhaps glee from those who believe Palworld utilized AI generated assets in its creation. What I want to know is, can Nintendo even win such a legal battle?

This might sound crazy to many reading this, but Nintendo is not invincible to losing lawsuits. They famously lost their lawsuit against Game Genie creator Galoob, which effectively allowed the creation and sale of private-use cheating devices for the Nintendo Entertainment System. A lawsuit by Nintendo is not necessarily a death sentence, IF you have the money to survive the long and costly process. If we accept that Palworld has sold ~25 million copies (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1447359/palworld-games-sales-worldwide/) at $30 a piece (I am going to ignore any sales between now and the games release,) and account for the industry standard 30% cut companies like Valve and Microsoft take when a game sale occurs on their platforms, then that leaves Pocketpair with a HALF A BILLION dollar warchest for their fight against Nintendo. Even if we say they only keep 20% of that warchest as pure profit, that still gives them $100 million for their legal defense fund. On top of all of that, we need to keep in mind that this game was released in January of THIS YEAR. This isn’t some decades long accrual of wealth that’s been slowly dwindling; this is an instant miracle Pocketpair was bestowed.

So, we’ve established that Pocketpair has the monetary means to fight off Nintendo, but this doesn’t mean they’re in the right when it comes to this lawsuit. I mean hey, they stole assets, right?! That’s a slam dunk copyright infringement case… they’re… they’re suing for copyright infringement, right??? Wrong, Nintendo has decided to sue for PATENT infringement, something significantly different from what we normally see from Nintendo. Current speculation theorizes that they are likely using patent number 20240278129, which is extremely long and goes over my head mostly, but the summary is in the screenshot below. The long and the short of it is, this patent relates to “catching characters in a virtual space and possessing them.”

This is the patent going around the internet that everyone points to. Nothing special right? Seems like they’re just patenting the concept of the Pokeball. Well… what people are pointing out is that date. May 2, 2024. That date happens to be the day the patent was officially granted. Well, Palworld came out in January, the patent wasn’t in effect then, so Nintendo has no case, right?! Case closed? Well… that might be the case if the lawsuit was being filed in the United States. Instead, this lawsuit is being filed in the Tokyo District Court. In Japan, some digging (and poor translations) leads me to believe that the Japanese version of this patent, which also happens to be the patent the US counterpart was based on, came into effect long before the release of Palword (translation confusion leads me to believe Japanese patent No. 2021-208275 came into effect at least before 2024, if not before 2023.)

So Pocketpair is sc*** then, right? They’re being sued in Japan as a Japanese company by a larger Japanese company on an already in effect Japanese patent. Well… that’s also not necessarily true. In my opinion, any slam dunk defenses about enforcement dates seem to be out of the window (I should add I am NOT a lawyer this is just an outsiders opinion.) What Pocketpair does have left is a different set of dates, and judicial mercy.

To keep this article from going another 12 paragraphs, I’m going to summarize my thoughts on how the case could go now that most of the hard facts have been stated. Pokémon has been around for decades; it took Nintendo until the 2020s to finally patent the idea of open world creature catching. A reasonable judge could argue that Nintendo waited too long to patent what is really just a slight modification of a concept they created back in the 90s. If Nintendo had, in laments terms “patented Pokeballs” the day Pokémon Red and Blue released in Japan, then the 20-year lifespan of a Japanese patent would have expired in 2016. That same judge could rule that Nintendo cannot patent what is again only a small modification of something they’ve created TWENTY YEARS in the future. They had their chance, lost it, would have lost it anyways if they took it back in the day, and now it’s too late. Personally, I think that even if the patent itself met all legal requirements for acceptance and enforcement (I do not know Japanese law and it is entirely possible everything I just said wouldn’t apply there,) the concept of catching characters and carrying them is a quite broad concept. The judge could simply say that the patent covers too broad of a concept to be reasonably enforced. To me, this seems like Nintendo trying to get revenge on Pocketpair for embarrassing them with Palword. Nintendo very well could apply this patent broadly, suing multiple companies from different angles yet they choose Pocketpair specifically. Barring everything I said about Japanese patent law being incorrect, or outright corruption, I see Pocketpair putting up one of the stronger defenses against Nintendo we’ve seen in a while.

Yes, I am rooting for Pocketpair, but the main point of this article was to try and lay out some facts and genuine paths for this case. Too many people want to see Palworld go down for more personal reasons or think it’s completely over for them after what has happened to projects like Yuzu or people like Gary Bowser. As is the case with many things in life, the truth is somewhere in the middle, and this is where I think the truth stands currently. I’d love to hear your opinions though so please comment them here and I’ll be glad to hear them out and respond. Finally, thank you to Wololo for his support and allowing me to thought dump on his website. It means the absolute world to me 🙂