Palworld, the surprise hit from Japanese developer Pocketpair is a game that many have described as “Pokemon with Guns”. It was released into beta around January 2024 and quickly gained record breaking 2 million concurrent player count on steam. While many enjoyed the game’s new and awkward setting, critics were surprised as to how the developers weren’t sued.
The Saga Begins
Eight months into this year Nintendo and the Pokemon company have finally sued Pocketpair for “infringement of patent rights” on 18th of September. This means that Nintendo and Co. are accusing Pocketpair of stealing their Intellectual Properties (IP)’s and profiting from them.
For those unfamiliar with Palworld it is as of now a free-to-play title where you are thrust into an open world to capture, train and evolve creatures called “Pals”. These captured Pals then help you in building bases, gathering resources and of course combat other Pals.
The way to capture them is similar to how you’d capture a pokemon, by throwing a ball and waiting for the RNG of whether or not the Pal breaks out of the ball or not. The Pals themselves also have ‘types’ associated with them such as “electric”,”fire”, “dragon” etc.
Now if this was said to anyone else in anyone else without any context they would think of Pokemon first. The only differing factor between these games is that Palworld allows the player to use guns while Nintendo obviously doesn’t.
Pocketpair Response To This Lawsuit
Pocketpair responded to the lawsuit the day after, acknowledging the lawsuit and stated that they will begin proceedings and investigate the claims made but they also have not been made aware of which specific patents they are accused of breaking.
Publicly available states that the Pokemon Company owns around 96 patents including game mechanics such as the process of capturing the pokemon by throwing a ball at it, a pokemon breeding system which is also available in Palworld.
While some argued that it can’t really be an infringement of copyright as the designs while being similar aren’t completely one-to-one, former attorney for the Pokemon Company, Don McGowan had other words to say, stating that it was a “ripoff nonsense” that surprised him for making it as far as it did.
Nintendo’s Bottomless History Of Litigation
It is well documented how aggressively Nintendo is willing to go, to protect their IPs and patents, earlier this year we saw Nintendo go after the creators of the much popular switch emulator Yuzu, which ended in Nintendo seizing all the code that was available and asking Microsoft to take it down from their Github repository.
The list seems endless and the hate of this side of Nintendo will always be with people affected who weren’t even trying to make profits from it. There are many instances of Nintendo shredding any goodwill that might have existed as they took down multiple mods of various games which were made for the sole purpose of sharing in a new experience with no precursor to gain profits from it.
Most companies have rules set so that people are allowed to tinker and create what they desire to share with the community such as the mods made for Baldur’s Gate 3 from Larian Studios which are all available to download and in a sort of plug and play system now, there is CD Projekt Red’s Modkit for Witcher 3 allowing users to create entire scenes to add to the game.
Companies create a sense of community by releasing mod engines and creating rules to allow others to express their ideas with the game or creation in question. This allows both parties to grow and learn from each other, while Nintendo expresses that they should foster such a community, they continue to go scorched earth on anyone trying to do anything with their games and IPs.
Either Pocketpair Wins Or We Say Goodbye To Palworld
Later it was found out that some Yuzu developers were charging money on accessing game files (ROMs) on their private discord for patreon subscribers. This update was the one that ultimately put the nail in the coffin for the emulator.
Nintendo also famously sent a cease-and-desist letter to a Super Smash Brothers tournament that was being held online around the pandemic after knowing that another unrelated tourney may have used a modded version of the game that allowed network access which they are not in favor of. While it is hard to say whether Pocketpair wins this lawsuit or not, history shows that Nintendo is on the winning side most times.
