Palworld Dev Says It Was "A Depressing Day" When Nintendo Sued

In 2024, Nintendo and The Pokemon Company sued Palworld developer Pocketpair on patent infringement claims, and now Palworld's community manager has revealed more details on how it all went down.

Appearing at GDC 2025 this week, community manager John Buckley said Pocketpair did "legal checks" prior to Palworld's release to try to mitigate a lawsuit risk in Japan, PC Gamer reported. Given that, Buckley said the team was confused when Nintendo and The Pokemon Company sued Pocketpair in Japan.

"When the lawsuit was announced we were like, 'What?' And we went back to the lawyers, and the lawyers contacted the courts and asked, 'What's going on?' and that's when we realized it was patents they were going for,'" Buckley said.

He added that it was a "very depressing day" for Pocketpair when it got sued, adding that developers at Pocketpair are big fans of the Pokemon series.

"It changed a lot of things for us. We were just about to release the PlayStation version, we were just about to go to Tokyo Game Show, so obviously we had to scale back a little bit and hire security guards and stuff like that," Buckley said.

Pocketpair posted a summery of the information, which reveals that the three Japanese patents in question for the lawsuit are No. 7545191, No. 7493117, and No. 7528390. Instead of going after Palworld for its Pokemon-like creatures, the patents appear to be centered on the mechanics of throwing a ball at characters, riding characters in the game, and shooting at targets.

Nintendo and The Pokemon Company are seeking an injunction against Pocketpair and Palworld, as well as a payment of 5 million yen (which is roughly just under $33,000 USD).

Analyst Serkan Toto said Nintendo is going after Pocketpair and Palworld because Pocketpair was "copying what they are doing." Toto also noted that Nintendo was trying to "spit in their bowl" by suing Pocketpair just before Palworld came to PS5.

"I don't think that Nintendo looks at these things through an idealistic lens at all. This is just a pure, cold-blooded business," Toto said.

Palworld continues to grow, as Pocketpair has just recently announced that cross-play is coming at the end of March 2025.