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“Pokémon with guns” game Palworld’s developer gets sued by Nintendo/Pokémon Company

Casey Baseel Sep 19, 2024
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Nintendo and The Pokémon Company’s legal teams used Infringement of Patent Rights claims! Will they be effective?

Almost as soon as video game Palworld was released in January of this year, people started calling it “Pokémon with guns.” Whether that’s an accurate description is something gamers have been debating since, and it looks like it’s now a question that the Japanese courts are going to have to consider too, as Nintendo and The Pokémon Company are suing Pocketpair, Palworld’s Tokyo-based developer.

Nintendo and The Pokémon Company contend that Palworld constitutes an infringement on their intellectual property rights and are seeking both an injunction against Pocketpair as well as compensation for damages. Nintendo has posted a brief statement regarding the lawsuit to its official Japanese website, in both Japanese and English, which reads:

Filing Lawsuit for Infringement of Patent Rights against Pocketpair, Inc.

Nintendo Co., Ltd. (HQ: Kyoto, Minami-ku, Japan; Representative Director and President: Shuntaro Furukawa, “Nintendo” hereafter), together with The Pokémon Company, filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the Tokyo District Court against Pocketpair, Inc. (HQ: 2-10-2 Higashigotanda, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo, “Defendant” hereafter) on September 18, 2024.

This 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.

Should the lawsuit make it all the way to trial without a settlement being reached, Pocketpair’s defense will have to hinge on establishing that Palworld is sufficiently different from Pokémon. In terms of gameplay, Palworld and the mainline Pokémon games don’t have all that much overlap. Whereas the main Pokémon games are rearig RPGs with turn-based combat, Palworld is an multiplayer open-world sandbox game with real-time first-person shooter-style combat and survival/crafting elements.

The fact that Palworld’s gameplay description sounds like an aggregate of game design buzzwords from the last 10 years doesn’t exactly help establish it as an innovative title, but it does at least set it apart from Pokémon’s game mechanics. However, it’s more likely that Nintendo/The Pokémon Company’s angle of attack in the lawsuit will be how closely Palworld appropriates the visual design of the Pokémon franchise, with multiple “Pals” looking like deliberate imitations of preexisting Pokémon species.

▼ Palworld launch trailer

The timing of the lawsuit also suggests that Nintendo/The Pokémon Company’s IP infringement claim may go beyond the Palworld game itself. It’s been eight months since Palworld’s release for Xbox and PC, but during the summer Pocketpair announced that it would be forming a new entity, Palworld Entertainment, Inc., in association with Sony Music Entertainment “to promote the licensing business of Palworld, both domestically and internationally.”

Though the lawsuit only mentions Pocketpair, not Palworld Entertainment, it could be that Nintendo/The Pokémon Company see the potential licensing of merchandise based off of Palworld’s creatures to be an upcoming additional layer of IP inveiglement, and one where gameplay differences between Palworld and Pokémon are irrelevant. The Palworld Entertainment official website contains a July 10 announcement that the company has been established “for developing the reach of the intellectual property and for expanding commercial business endeavors, including the global licensing and merchandising activities associated with Palworld, outside of the interactive game,” but also says that the company is “in the works” and has posted no updates since.

As such, it could be that Nintendo/The Pokémon Company were resigned to letting the Palworld game itself slide, but now that Pocketpair has its sights set on Palworld becoming a wider entertainment franchise with more purely visual elements, they’ve been convinced that now is the time to take legal action.

Exact motivations aside, Pocketpair now finds itself with a gauntlet thrown down by two companies whose legal teams have a very strong record in IP infringement disputes.

Source: Nintendo, Pocketpair, Palworld Entertainment (1, 2)
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