In a statement, after acknowledging the lawsuit, Pocketpair says it is “unaware of the specific patents we are accused of infringing upon”, since it has “not been notified of such details”. Later in the statement, the studio remarks that having to dedicate “significant time” to the lawsuit rather than focusing on the game is “truly unfortunate”, but says that it will do its best to “ensure that indie game developers are not hindered or discouraged from pursuing their creative ideas.”

“Pocketpair is a small indie game company based in Tokyo. Our goal as a company has always been to create fun games,” Pocketpair’s official statement reads. “We will continue to pursue this goal because we know that our games bring joy to millions of gamers around the world. Palworld was a surprise success this year, both for gamers and for us. We were blown away by the amazing response to the game and have been working hard to make it even better for our fans. We will continue improving Palworld and strive to create a game that our fans can be proud of.

“It is truly unfortunate that we will be forced to allocate significant time to matters unrelated to game development due to this lawsuit. However, we will do our utmost for our fans, and to ensure that indie game developers are not hindered or discouraged from pursuing their creative ideas.

“We apologize to our fans and supporters for any worry or discomfort that this news has caused.”

Palworld is available in early access on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC. Within roughly a month of its release, Pocketpair announced that it had crossed 25 million players across all platforms.

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.

Taking to Twitter, Nintendo has announced that Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team will be coming to Nintendo Switch Online a week from now, on August 9, at which point those subscribed to Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack will be able to jump in.

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team was part of the original duo of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon titles, alongside Blue Rescue Team, which released at the same time for the Nintendo DS.

Interestingly, a remake of the dungeon crawling roguelike duo is also available on the Nintendo Switch in the for of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX. Read our review of the game through here, where we gave it a score of 5/10, criticizing its combat, dungeons, and repetitive nature.

As reported by Serebii (owner of the popular Pokemon website of the same name) on ResetEra, Pokemon Sword and Shield took a little under three years to reach the same milestone. Within its first 16 to 17 months, it sold 21.85 million.

When considering lifetime sales, Pokemon Red, Green, and Blue are still ahead with 31.38 million units sold. Pokemon Sword and Shield is in second place, with current sales at 26.35 million, while Pokemon Scarlet and Violet is in third. Not bad for a title criticized at launch for its extensive technical issues.

The next title in the franchise is Pokemon Legends: Z-A, out in 2025 and set entirely in Lumiose City from Pokemon X and Y’s Kalos region. With Nintendo indicating a launch for Nintendo Switch “systems,” it could launch alongside the console’s successor. Head here for more details on the latter.

That’s as per a report published by Pocketgamer.biz, which claims that the app has earned over $100 million in revenue in its first year. Since July, the app has seen Japanese users spending over $73 million on it, with users in the United States spending another $15 million. In fourth place is Taiwan with $4 million spent.

In total, the report claims the app has been downloaded over 9.8 million times since last July, with 44 percent of those downloads coming from Japan, 17 percent from the US, and 7 percent from Taiwan.

Of course, compared to fellow mobile Pokemon outing Pokemon GO, Pokemon Sleep’s numbers are positively tiny, but for a sleep-tracking app, it has done well enough in its first year.

In fact, shortly after Palworld came out and turned into an unexpected revelation, The Pokemon Company said it would “investigate and take appropriate measures to address any acts that infringe on intellectual property rights related to Pokémon“. According to Palworld developer Pocketpair, however, no official complaint has yet been filed.

Speaking to Game File, when asked about whether Pocketpair had received any commination from The Pokemon Company related to the matter, Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe said, “Nothing at all. Nintendo and The Pokemon Company didn’t say anything to us. Of course I love Pokemon and respect it. I grew up with it, in my generation.”

Whether that means The Pokemon Company and Nintendo decided that there was no actual case of copyright and trademark infringement, or if the companies are yet to take action on a case that’s being worked on behind-the-scenes is anyone’s guess- though the former might seem more likely at this stage.

Interestingly enough, Mizobe recently also spoke about a potential Switch release for Palworld, saying that it would be difficult due to “technical reasons”. A PS5 version of the survival game, however, is seemingly being teased.

Palworld is currently available in early access on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC. It recently saw the release of a major free update.

As per Merrick, Pokemon Works’ offices are situated in the same building that also houses the offices of independent support studio ILCA, which served as the lead developer on 2021’s Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, and 2020’s Pokemon Home.

However, it’s unknown whether working closely with ILCA on future titles is going to be a mandate for Pokemon Works. In fact, currently, it’s unknown what exact purpose the newly-established subsidiary will be serving.

Pokemon games in the Nintendo Switch era have frequently been criticized for the poor technical states they have launched in. Following backlash against Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, The Pokemon Company said it was having internal conversations about how best to ensure future instalments hit a certain bar of quality, without having to significantly alter the series’ release schedule. Earlier this year, it was claimed that the company had taken criticism for Scarlet and Violet seriously, and was taking steps to ensure that similar issues were avoided in future titles.

The next mainline Pokemon game, Pokemon Legends: Z-A, was announced last month. Set entirely within the Kalos region’s Lumiose City, it will launch sometime in 2025.

This company is set up in Shinjuku in Tokyo in the same building as ILCA.

— Joe Merrick (@JoeMerrick) March 11, 2024

It’s no wonder that fans of the franchise have been as desperate for another game in the Pokemon Legends line as they have been for the last couple of years, and sure enough, at the recent Pokemon Presents presentation, Pokemon Legends: Z-A was indeed unveiled. All we got to see was a very brief trailer, and it wasn’t even a trailer that showed us any gameplay whatsoever. Details on the game are still scant, and at this point, it’s still at least a year away from release. And yet, in spite of all of that, we’re already incredibly excited about the game- or at least about the promises that it’s making and hinting at.

There’s several reasons for that, but chief among them is probably the setting. It’s been confirmed that Pokemon Legends: Z-A is going to be set entirely in Lumiose City, the Paris-inspired hub that served as the centerpiece of the Kalos region in Pokemon X and Y on the 3DS. It looks like we’re going to be involved in an urban redevelopment plan, which likely means this is another prequel, one that is centered around building Lumiose City into what it becomes, and what we recognize it as from the 3DS games. The YouTube description of the game’s official trailer suggests the same, mentioning “an urban redevelopment plan” that will “shape the city into a place that belongs to both people and Pokemon”.

The trailer itself also let that on in some interesting ways. Much of the trailer shows a sort of holographic rendition of Lumiose City, perhaps indicating that these are blueprints of sort of what the aforementioned urban redevelopment plan envisions Lumiose City as. Right off the bat, that’s an intriguing core premise. For starters, the plain and simple fact that the game is going to be set entirely in just one city is unprecedented for the Pokemon franchise. Sure, Jubilife Village was really the only town in the entirety of Pokemon Legends: Arceus, and served as your base of operations throughout the game- but there was a whole world split into multiple regions outside the village that we got to explore. 

With Pokemon Legends: Z-A being set entirely in Lumiose City, we might be in for a game that is going to be quite different from its predecessor, both structurally and aesthetically. Structurally, it should be interesting to see how significantly the core loop will change to fit the premise of building a city. For instance, are we also going to be focused on acquiring materials or recruiting people to help build Lumiose City, rather than focusing exclusively on catching Pokemon? And with the game being set in a single city, how large can we expect the map to be, and how varied will the environments that we explore be?

Beyond that, the setting might also be hinting at a shift in aesthetic (to some degree at least). Of course, the Pokemon Legends aesthetic was very prominent in Z-A’s announcement trailer, but the trailer does also seem to indicate that the game isn’t going to be set as far back in the past as Arceus was. The grand ambitions that Lumiose’s redevelopment plan has for the city would suggest that we’re looking at, at the very least, a contemporary setting (or close enough to contemporary), as opposed to Legends, which was basically feudal. A willingness to make meaningful changes to the core experience has long been one of the mainline Pokemon franchise’s biggest problems, so the prospect of a Legends sequel that is making such significant changes is in and of itself an exciting one.

But there are other reasons to be excited as well, of course- like the fact that the Kalos region’s lore lends itself incredibly well to a Pokemon Legends game. Arceus did an excellent job of diving deep into the Sinnoh region’s backstory, and with Z-A, Game Freak has the opportunity to do the same for what’s probably one of the more overlooked corners of the Pokemon universe. Pokemon X and Y are considered by many to be the series’ black sheep, which means Kalos, by association, doesn’t really get a lot of time in the spotlight. That’s made even worse by the fact that we never got the fabled Pokemon Z that supposedly would have dived deeper into the region’s lore. Series fans have every reason, then, to be excited about a game that’s (potentially) finally going to deliver on that unfulfilled promise- that “Z” in the Pokemon Legends: Z-A’s title isn’t accidental, after all.

And there is going to be plenty for the game to dive into. X and Y’s lore is surprisingly dark for Pokemon games, revolving around a war that broke out between Kalos and another region 3000 years ago, leading to AZ, the king of Kalos, creating what he dubbed the Ultimate Weapon, which led to millions of Pokemon and human lives being wiped out. A Pokemon Legends game that dives deeper into that war, AZ’s past, and the region’s legendary Pokemon (especially the ever-so-mysterious Zygarde) could potentially do a lot of interesting things with its story (as Pokemon Legends: Arceus so frequently hinted at doing). Of course, if Z-A is indeed taking place in a much more modern setting than Arceus, that would still put us far, far away from the Kalos war, chronologically speaking, so it remains to be seen exactly how the game is going to rope that into its story. That it will do it somehow is definitely not in doubt, however.

Of course, the one question the vast majority of people are going to have is whether Pokemon Legends: Z-A is going to suffer from the same technical issues like the vast majority of mainline Pokemon games have in the Switch era. Game Freak and The Pokemon Company have, thus far, seemed unwilling to make the improvements that are so desperately needed, and the fact that Pokemon games keep selling like peanuts regardless certainly does make you wonder whether they’re ever going to have any reason to. Then again, publicly, at least, they have said a few times in the past couple of years that they’re trying to polish up the series’ development pipeline so they can deliver games at a higher level of technical quality. The hope is that they’re going to back those words with action.

With the Pokemon franchise taking the unusual year off in 2024 and Legends: Z-A coming (at least) three years after its predecessor, is it finally going to be the Pokemon game that has a decent budget and at least a passable level of technical polish? I mean, that’s not asking too much, right? If the game turns out to be a launch title for the Nintendo Switch 2 – which it very well might be, given recent reports that the console is now targeting a March 2025 release – you’d imagine Nintendo, The Pokemon Company, and Game Freak would want the game to at least look fine, and not shockingly ugly the way most Pokemon games have done in recent years.

Then again, ultimately, even with its technical warts, Pokemon Legends: Arceus was a fantastic game, maybe one of the best games available on the Switch, and definitely one of the best all time Pokemon games. So even if Legends: Z-A continues the franchise’s tradition of disappointing technical performance, we can at least hopefully look forward to another great and compelling title- one that hopefully builds on everything that was great about Legends: Arceus, and continues to take the Pokemon franchise in exciting new directions. Hopefully we will see significant technical upgrades, but even if we don’t, we’re at least starting off from a strong base.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

“Watch to see the reveal trailer for Pokemon Legends: Z-A, a new adventure set entirely within Lumiose City, coming to Nintendo Switch in 2025,” said Nintendo of America as it shared the announcement trailer for the game.

Lumiose City itself was a major focus of the announcement trailer for Pokemon Legends: Z-A. The trailer indicated that the city is undergoing an urban redevelopment, with the vision of becoming a new home for both humans and Pokemon alike.

Pokemon Legends: Z-A is set for release in 2025 and will be coming exclusively to Nintendo Switch “systems”. Whether that means it will be a cross-gen release remains to be seen.

Watch to see the reveal trailer for #PokemonLegendsZA, a new adventure set entirely within Lumiose City, coming to #NintendoSwitch in 2025. https://t.co/HHIlcwKvno

— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) February 27, 2024

The trailer showcases Lumiose City, which is undergoing an urban redevelopment plan. The goal is to create a city for people and Pokemon, with various iconic pocket monsters like Pikachu, Sylveon and many more teased throughout. It’s worth noting that the city is located in the Kalos region from Pokemon X and Y.

Perhaps Pokemon Legends: Z-A takes place in the near future, and the region will see major changes. Time will tell, so stay tuned. As for its release on Nintendo Switch “systems,” it could coincide with the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2, rumored to arrive in March 2025 after facing an internal delay. Head here for more details.