Nintendo and The Pokemon Company Are Suing Palworld Developer Pocketpair for Patent Infringement

Palworld turned into an overnight revelation upon its early access launch earlier this year, and it’s fair to say that a lot of its popularity was down to the many similarities it shares with Pokemon. As a survival crafting game, from a gameplay perspective, those similarities are few and far between, but Palworld does heavily feature a large variety of monsters that can be fought against, caught and trained, used in battles, and what have you, and a lot of these monsters have designs that bear more than a passing resemblance to Pokemon designs.

Instantly upon Palworld’s release, there were many who wondered if Nintendo and The Pokemon Company would be taking legal action against developer Pocketpair, not least because of how trigger happy they typically tend to be in that arena, though in July, Pocketpair stated that it had received no official complaints from either company on that front. That, it seems, has changed.

Nintendo has confirmed that it is suing Palworld developer Pocketpair for patent infringement, for which it is seeking injunction and compensation. A patent infringement lawsuit was filed against the developer jointly by Nintendo and The Pokemon Company in the Tokyo District Court earlier today, on September 18.

“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’s release reads.

“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.”

Palworld is currently available in early access on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC. As of February, it had over 25 million players across all platforms. As per Pocketpair, the game was developed on a budget of $6.7 million, going on to make “tens of billions of yen” in profit. Read more on that through here.