It's been over half a year since Palworld launched, so you could be forgiven for thinking the Pokémon-alike had managed to avoid attracting legal trouble from Nintendo. But it was not to be — Pocketpair, the creator of Palworld, is being sued by The Pokémon Company for patent infringement.
News in brief
- The Pokémon Company has initiated legal proceedings against Pocketpair
- Palworld had long been suspected of copying various Pokémon designs
- Suit is for patent infringement, not copyright
Palworld was the big hit from the start of this year. Launching in January, it got the year off to a blazing start, with millions of people diving into a game that promised to be, well, Pokémon with guns. A survival action-adventure game with monster-taming and the big hook, Palworld was the evolution in Pokémon's formula that a lot of people had been waiting for, and it benefited as a result, making Pocketpair a lot of money.
But we used "Pokémon" a lot when describing the game, and that didn't go unnoticed, both by the community at large, and Nintendo itself. Within days of the game's release and huge jump in popularity, Pokémon fans were comparing the designs and meshes of the game's monsters, and claiming they were eerily similar to Pokémon designs. The Pokémon Company announced the same month it would be looking into potential infringements of its intellectual property, but since nothing more had been heard, it was assumed all was fine.
"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," is how Nintendo words it in its official announcement. What's interesting is the suit is based on patent infringement, rather than copyright. A business lawyer on Twitter (X) has described the case as potentially being a reach, with it being "hard to imagine what patents (*not* copyrights) might have been even plausibly infringed". However, he does admit he would need to know more about the case before commenting further. For their part, Pocketpair's developer lead Takuro Mizobe has stated Pocketpair "has no intention of infringing upon the intellectual property of other companies".
