Patents Nintendo Suing Palworld Over Confirmed, But, Damn, This Suit Is Weird

If you’ve followed along with our coverage on the hit video game Palworld, developed by Pocketpair, you will know that Nintendo and the Pokémon Co. has sued Pocketpair for patent infringement. Prior to the suit, there had been a ton of speculation that a lawsuit would be filed, but that it would be a copyright infringement suit. That was because there was a clear inspirational element in Palworld harkening back to Pokémon properties, though we also argued that no direct copying had occurred, only concepts and ideas repurposed. For that reason, I was excited that any copyright suit would serve as a demonstration of the idea/expression dichotomy in copyright law. And I generally believed that such a suit would be filed, given the overtly litigious history of both Nintendo and The Pokémon Co.

Instead we got the patent infringement lawsuit. Speculation began immediately as to what patent or patents would be at the heart of that suit. Generally, said speculation landed on a parent and several divisional patents that involve throwing an object at an on-screen character or creature in a video game in order to capture it. That itself was somewhat perplexing, as games that are older than Pokémon have had similar mechanics to that in the past.

But now we have confirmation that that speculation was mostly correct.

“The Plaintiffs,” says Pocketpair, “claim that ‘Palworld,’ released by us on January 19, 2024, infringes upon the following three patents held by the Plaintiffs, and are seeking an injunction against the game and compensation for a portion of the damages incurred between the date of registration of the patents and the date of filing of this lawsuit.”

Looking up those patents, the first alludes to a system where a player aims and fires an “item” toward a character in a field, and in doing so triggers combat, and then dives into extraordinary intricacies about switching between modes within this. The second is very similar, but seems more directly focused on tweaking previous patents to including being able to capture Pokémon in the wild, rather than only during battle. The third, rather wildly, seems to be trying to claim a modification to the invention of riding creatures in an open world and being able to transition between them easily.

I’ll restate what I said in the previous post about these patents. These patents cover broad ideas. It’s a wonder to me why those patents were ever granted in the first place. The paperwork covering them, though rife with pretty diagrams and pictures, doesn’t exactly outline the sort of inventive content I was expecting. Instead, they appear to cover concepts of game mechanics, as though Nintendo or The Pokémon Co. could gobble up the right to use them in video games. The last of these patents in the quote above is perhaps the best example of this.

But it gets even starnger after that.

The statement also includes details on the damages Nintendo is seeking, for what it’s claiming is a violation of it intellectual property. The company wants 10 million yen to be equally split between Nintendo Co., Ltd., and The Pokémon Company. That works out to just under $33,000 each.

All of this for roughly $66,000? I’d have to think that any such award would be eaten into heavily by whatever time and monetary investment these two companies have made into this lawsuit. What can explain the desire by Nintendo and The Pokémon Co. to move forward with this suit when there is so little on the line?

The best I can come up with is that both of these companies just can’t help themselves when it comes to intellectual property. They seem to be more interested in getting their pound, or perhaps ounce, of flesh than making any sort of sound business decisions.