Almost as soon as video game Palworld was released in January of this year, people started calling it “Pokemon 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 Pokemon 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, together with The Pokemon Company, filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the Tokyo District Court against Pocketpair Inc 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 Pokemon. In terms of gameplay, Palworld and the mainline Pokemon games don’t have all that much overlap. Whereas the main Pokemon 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 Pokemon Company’s angle of attack in the lawsuit will be how closely Palworld appropriates the visual design of the Pokemon franchise, with multiple “Pals” looking like deliberate imitations of preexisting Pokemon species."
▼ Palworld launch trailer
The timing of the lawsuit also suggests that Nintendo/The Pokemon 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 Pokemon 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 Pokemon 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 Pokemon 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.
Sources: Nintendo, Pocketpair, Palworld Entertainment
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3 Comments
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owzer
Different company name, different characters, different game play. Get rekt Nintendo!
virusrex
Hardly surprising since Nintendo has always been quick to protect their name brand and characters, I guess Palworld got too successful for their own good.
Ken
I think they knew it would be successful and used that to make the most out of it. But it really did look like copy and paste. It's not hard to be original or if you try to copy and paste through AI don't used what's the most popular world wide, they should have went with Spectrobes instead because nobody knows what that is