Nintendo and The Pokémon company have filed a lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair, alleging “infringement of patent rights”.
After filing suit, Nintendo published a press release noting that they had sued the Palworld dev, And that they are seeking “injunction against infringement and compensation for damages on the grounds that Palworld, a game developed and released by the Defendant, infringes multiple patent rights”.
The notice doesn't go into any details about what patents they are claiming Pocketpair to be infringing upon. Pocketpair later released a statement saying that the company itself hasn’t even been notified yet what these patents in question are. In their statement, titled simply, “Regarding the Lawsuit”, they note that they are “a small indie game company based in Tokyo” with a goal to “create fun games”. Palworld was “a surprising success” and they vow to continue improving upon the game and “make it even better for our fans”.
Even before Palworld was released, to eventual great success, with millions of copies of the survival crafting game sold, questions arose about whether or not (or even to what degree) the team may have potentially infringed upon the Pokémon IP. Even Nexus Mods specifically banned Pokémon related mods for Palworld, saying that "hosting content that adds Pokémon copyrighted characters or assets into the game is almost certainly going to put us at risk of legal action".
It always seemed like a question of when we would see a lawsuit.
Now, there is a lawsuit, and Nintendo says that it will “continue to take necessary actions against any infringement of its intellectual property rights”. It will take some time for this to play out in the courts.
Pocketpair acknowledges the time, money, and effort this will take. “It is truly unfortunate that we will be forced to allocate significant time to matters unrelated to game development due to this lawsuit,” they say, apologizing to fans for any potential worry that this lawsuit may cause.
