Image: Pocketpair
Nintendo is filing a lawsuit against Pocketpair, seemingly over the Pokemon-like similarities found in Palworld.
Many have spotted similarities between the hit survival game Palworld and the Pokemon franchise, to the point that publisher Nintendo announced earlier this year that it would “investigate” the game for possible cases of patent infringement. Today, Nintendo has made good on that ominous promise by announcing a lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair for infringing “multiple patent rights”.
Nintendo announced the lawsuit on its website today:
Nintendo sues Palworld developer Pocketpair over alleged patent infringement
Nintendo has announced that it’s officially filing a patent infringement lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair. The company announced that it had filed the lawsuit in the Tokyo District Court “together with The Pokemon Company”, confirming that the lawsuit is focused on similarities between Palworld and the Pokemon franchise.
The lawsuit was filed on September 18, and 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”. The company’s announcement ends by saying that it will “continue to take necessary actions” against possible cases of intellectual property rights infringement “to protect the intellectual properties it has worked hard to establish over the years”.
Palworld hasn’t exactly shied away from its Pokemon comparisons. While its core gameplay has little to do with Pokemon, it does involve collecting a wide variety of monsters, trapping them in balls and using them to battle other monsters. Some of these monsters bear resemblances to specific Pokemon as well, but one could chalk that up to simple coincidence.
Nintendo first announced that it was investigating Palworld for possible copyright infringement back in January this year. In June, Pocketpair confirmed that it had heard “nothing at all” from both Nintendo and The Pokemon Company regarding a lawsuit, suggesting that it had been quietly dropped. Given today’s events however, it’s clear that Nintendo has been working on a case for this lawsuit for quite some time.
Pocketpair has not issued a response to the lawsuit yet, but it has applied a new hotfix to Palworld since it was announced.