Video Games

Nintendo seeks injunction and damage payments from Palworld dev Pocketpair in lawsuit

Palworld dev lists details of the lawsuit

Marco Wutz

Pocketpair

Pocketpair, the developer of Palworld, has published details on the lawsuit filed against it by The Pokémon Company and Nintendo in Japan, listing the patents it’s being accused of infringing as well as the demands leveled against it.

According to the accused party, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company are seeking an injunction against Palworld, preventing it from being sold, and claim a total of ¥10 million Yen in damages – that’s about $65,000 USD, so a fairly small amount when stacked against the money Palworld has generated for Pocketpair so far.

Pocketpair explained that it’s being accused of violating Nintendo’s rights to Patent No. 7545191, Patent No. 7493117, and Patent No. 7528390, which it said were filed between February and July 2024.

It’s important to note that all three of these patents have been existing in some form since 2021, as listed on Google Patents (7545191, 7493117, 7528390), although Nintendo and The Pokémon Company have refreshed or modified them this year at the dates specified by Pocketpair – this is difficult for us to determine in detail without having in-depth knowledge of the Japanese patent system.

Likewise, it’s difficult to ascertain what exactly each of these patents does – 7545191 seems to describe the inputs required to throw Poké Balls (or Pal Spheres) to catch creatures as well as to summon them onto the field for combat. The other two patents appear to be connected to the areas of character movement, collision, and pathfinding.

This once again confirms that Nintendo and The Pokémon Company have sued Pocketpair on technical grounds, not due to any copyright infringement.

Pocketpair will “continue to assert our position in this case through future legal proceedings,” meaning it will fight the lawsuit at court.

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Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg

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