Nintendo is now suing Pocketpair for infringing patent

Source.

Nintendo Co., Ltd. (HQ: Kyoto, Minami-ku, Japan; Representative Director and President: Shuntaro Furukawa, “Nintendo” hereafter), together with The Pokémon Company, filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the Tokyo District Court against Pocketpair, Inc. (HQ: 2-10-2 Higashigotanda, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo, “Defendant” hereafter) 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.

A lawyer's initial thoughts on the matter

What are these patents?🤔

Even a lawyer is asking that too lol. Feels like Nintendo is suing so Pocketpair loses money from legal fees.

It's on!

@pclover1980: Until the patents(not sure what they are referencing) are identified, this lawsuit is lacking in clarity.

Meanwhile at Nintendo HQ:

@Pedro: We'll probably know in the future. I'll keep updating the thread in case we see it.

They should've sued them on day 1 of release, before they had the Palworld money to defend themselves.

They likely would've caved to this frivolous lawsuit, but they have standing now so I can't imagine this going anywhere

You need time to collect evidence before diving right in.

Even then, it would be a weak case for copyright infringement, which this lawsuit didn't specify.

This is a patent lawsuit.

Nintendo is pathetic.

If they would put effort in to their Pokemon games, an indie developer wouldn't be eating their lunch .

Regardless, Nintendo's lawyers do NOT f*** around. We've all seen evidence of that.

@nintendoboy16: Yup. Suing just in hopes the defendant loses a lot of money until they are forced to go bankrupt.

Typical conglomerates.

PocketPair better hope Nintendo doesn’t learn about Craftopia from all this.

PocketPair has a reputation of being the off-brand Nintendo plagiarizing dev for a while now. This suit is interesting though because it’s regarding software patents and not art/design. The fact that Nintendo and TPC are looking past the blatant plagiarism and going after patents means they’ve got something good. Let’s see what it is…

This might be news to you, their team of lawyers do not make the games.

To me it seems like a dumb lawsuit but what do I know, patents in Japan might be stupider than here.

And what lunch did PocketPair eat? Pokemon is still making TONS of money and pulling numbers Palworld can only dream of. What are we talking about here?!

This will be interesting. Lots of creative works purposefully invoke a closeness to other IPs and generally laws are okay with that even up to a very close likeness. They'd have to (I'd imagine) definitively show that Palworld developed their asset models not only to be close to that of Pokémon, but also that they did so by say using their code or some digital asset for the character models and such.

I think Nintendo just wants to muscle these people, same way they muscle content creators on YouTube and such. But I'd love for them to fight it out. I'd love for Pocketpair to (not that it matters legally) to accuse Nintendo of becoming complacent with Pokémon's success not to try harder to make better quality games and that's why Nintendo is motivated to try to squash their game.

That's kinda the point. Now that they have money, Nintendo can get more money out of them. If Nintendo wins, they get more money. They can also pressure them into a settlement, which can be substantial now that they have money. If Nintendo loses, it is no biggie as they can say they tried. The time and money spent on legal is business as usual for them. These big companies are ruthless. They will sue whenever they see an opportunity.

People were wondering why they didn't sue them before. Well they just needed to get all their ducks in a row first.

@ghostofgolden: they have sold very well and have a game that looks better than theirs despite having an infinitely smaller budget.

It's true it's a PC game rather than switch, but pokemon games look bad even for switch standards.

Some of you guys are weirdos on thinking Nintendo is gonna win this case when they knew Palworld was a thing since it's Early Access, so they had time to sued but this is kinda late on their part.

Also, I really really want to know what patents they're alleging? All of the "this character looks just like this character" wouldn't fall under patents. That would be copyright law, not patent law.

@davillain: We'll know once the court battle starts

@pclover1980: Just surprised it took Nintendo this long to start filing. At the time, it seems as if Nintendo is jealous how good Palworld really is.

Not surprisingly, they gathered enough evidence to file a lawsuit.

You really really wanna know? Take a look then... maybe you find something...

https://patents.justia.com/assignee/the-pokemon-company

Both of these were filed after Palworld released lmao. If these are the patents, then Nintendo is definitely reaching

I'm no expert but both of those items seem very vague, I think the boarding object one is a variation on mountable objects inside a video game and the ability of said mount to transition between an aerial and terrestrial modes, probably too vague and general to actually defend unless they could demonstrate the devs have directly used Nintendo code to achieve something similar. The second one seems even more vague as my interpretation is that's describing aiming and throwing tech, which is present in a huge number of games for grenades etc. and then the point about deploying a "fighting character" could be interpreted as something like deploying AI driven mines in various titles so again if that's the basis of the argument they are reaching massively.

@pclover1980 said:

Both of these were filed after Palworld released lmao. If these are the patents, then Nintendo is definitely reaching

I swear these companies would sue "fun" if they could.

@R4gn4r0k:

Pocketpair does what Nintendont!! :P

The Jez is speaking clearly:

@pclover1980 said:

Both of these were filed after Palworld released lmao. If these are the patents, then Nintendo is definitely reaching

Adventure Island 2 and Robotrek for example do those things, and they are prior art.

It looks like Japan has a "first to file" patent system so prior art does not matter, their laws are stupid.

Imagine someone patented those things in 2023, then Nintendo and TPC would have to give them money. How stupid is that?

@girlusocrazy: I heard the Japanese legal system is pretty rough. At least compared to the American one. Like criminals are basically almost always guilty when they have a trial.

Firstly, this is filed in Japan, so Japanese law governs. Can't comment on how their patent regimes are interpreted and applied, but I can't fathom a patent claim of this kind holding up to scrutiny in the US.

Reading between the tea leaves, this suit seems like a stretch, so there is definitely someone at Nintendo who is so pissed off at Palworld and its encroachment on Pokemon that they are willing to proceed with any kind of action, despite their lawyers likely telling them it's a longshot. All in all it seems Nintendo just wants to make them bleed as much as possible in the form of attorneys' fees.

@pclover1980: I seem to recall hearing something similar. I guess we'll have to wait and see what happens. If something like this succeeds, it sounds bad for innovation in games though.

Could see a lawsuit coming from a mile away... But I was expecting a copyright infringement lawsuit, not patent infringement.

I saw it coming.

Ugh. The downside of Nintendo.

From what I have seen it's not a copyright infringement but a patent one (patents on gameplay mechanics....bloody hell who greenlit that?). I haven't seen the actual patents though.

It will be interesting to see how far Nintendo go with this. This may be a legalacide strategy to get them to pull the product off the market. Ninty don't mess around with the legal stuff. They also rarely lose.

I think Sony have a stake in the palworld company now too. So it could turn into a right ol ding dong if both camps decide to dig their heels in.

More details from Pocketpair officially responded to news of the lawsuit:

At least this isn't a Copyright Lawsuit as Nintendo knew Palworld existence since it's Early Access otherwise, they would have taken action a long time ago.

Patent lawsuit on game mechanics is much fucking worse if Nintendo wins this. This could be another "Nemesis System" by WB.

God Nintendo as a company really just sucks.

@pclover1980: It's as stupid as patenting situations for characters to get into, character archetypes, biome types, or a sport.

Part of this is on Nintendo, the other part is on the system of laws that allows such stupidness.

Nintendo's so candy ass. Their Pokemon designs where ripped straight from Dragon quest monsters and then they turn all Draco Malfoy whenever they get the chance. Im suprised they haven't sued the world for using keys because they have a Pokemon that is literally a set of keys.

@pcgamerlaszlo: The creators of Pokemon claimed to be inspired by Dragon Quest V.

@girlusocrazy: Then the creators of Palworld where inspired by Pokemon.. One's just more sniveling and morally bankrupt than the other.

I don't think this will end well.

Japan is essentially a self-regulating corporate oligarchy; they serve themselves for the most part, and every once in a while some corporate executive will abuse their power and they will get punished so they can say "See? We are handling out business" but for the most part of a corporation over there has a problem with you, you're done.

With that said, I'm not a lawyer but I find the "patent" vs "copyright" distinction kind of interesting. Does patent apply more to a specific game mechanic? Whereas a copyright is like art assets and such?

In either case, I hope this ends well for both companies but my default attitude is to defend the Palworld dev up to the point they clearly broke the law and stole or infringed on something.

my hunch is Nintendo is concerned about the 12 million (!!!) sales and is flexing and saber-rattling.