Nintendo and Pokémon Company sue Palworld maker Pocket Pair for patent infringement

Nintendo and The Pokémon Company sued Palworld maker Pocket Pair for patent infringement today, according to a filing by Nintendo.

The surprise might be more about how long it took for this to happen, as Palworld, which generated more than 25 million downloads earlier this year, was always nicknamed “Pokémon with Guns.”

Nintendo said the 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. We have asked Pocket Pair for comment.

We haven’t seen the details of the lawsuit yet. But the question will address an important legal point of where the line is when it comes to copying something versus being inspired to create a legally protected variant of a game. For instance, there are lots of real-time strategy games in the market, and no single game company owns a patent on RPG games. Even so, no game company is allowed to directly copy art work and other elements of somebody else’s RPG game. I did a panel on this at Devcom in Germany recently, mostly with respect to copyright and AI.

The art work for some of the Palworld characters looks very similar to Pokémon characters. But Pokémon is not a violent shooter or survival game. What percentage of the art has to be the same before a court will declare infringement? We’ll probably find out.

Meanwhile, The Pokémon Company did win this lawsuit on copyright infringement. However, as noted, this is a patent-infringement lawsuit.