Today, Palworld developer Pocketpair published a report detailing the terms of the intellectual property lawsuit Nintendo filed against the studio in September. When Nintendo announced its lawsuit, it claimed that Palworld “infringes multiple patent rights” but did not specify which patents were being claimed, leaving us to speculate whether Nintendo would bring its legal guns to bear on third-party Poké Ball throwing.
Thanks to Pocketpair’s report, we finally have confirmation about the patents that are the basis for the Nintendo infringement allegations. Nintendo’s lawsuit alleges that Palworld infringes three Japanese patents: 7545191, 7493117, and 7528390, a trio that grants Nintendo protection in the realm of creature capture and riding.
Pocketpair’s report details the filing and registration dates of the patents in question – all three of which were filed by and granted to Nintendo in the months following Palworld’s release in January 2024. However, each filing in the lawsuit is a continuation of a series of patents . patents that Nintendo originally filed in 2021 during the development of Pokémon Legends: Arceus.
As IP attorney Kirk Sigmon explained in an interview with PC Gamer in September, patent continuations – called “division patents” in Japanese legal practice – allow a patent holder to specify additional claims as an extension of the original patent. “As you go through this process and file divisions, continuations or whatever, you create claims that are more and more tailored to the allegation,” Sigmon said. “You know more about what you can get and what you can’t get, and what you can also do – if you know who you’re going to sue – is build claims to target them.”
Nintendo had also filed divisional patents after Pocketpair began releasing Palworld gameplay footage, suggesting that Nintendo may have begun drafting additional patent applications well before the eventual lawsuit.
“If they were aware of Palworld, or if they were concerned about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if they went back and said to their patent attorneys, ‘We want to dismiss claims that we think they’re willing to to act,'” Sigmon told PC Gamer. in September.
Pocketpair also reports that Nintendo is seeking an injunction against Palworld, which would halt sales of the game until the infringing mechanics are removed. Considering that the patents Nintendo claims appear to cover some of Palworld’s basic mechanics, removing and replacing them seems like it would take a lot of work. In addition, Nintendo is seeking aggregate damages of 5 million yen (approximately $33,000) plus late payment damages for both itself and The Pokémon Company.
Considering the tens of millions of copies Palworld has sold, that combined figure of $66,000 may not seem like a high fee for Pocketpair, but as Sigmon told PC Gamer, those damages represent only a fraction of what a patent lawsuit could cost the parties involved.
“You’re burning millions of dollars just trying to make this go away,” Sigmon said. “You have to find specialists. You have to hire a team to do it. You have to find people who are really good at it, otherwise you almost automatically lose. It becomes extremely expensive and time-consuming, and it can exhaust a lot of small businesses.”
While the disgrace to Nintendo’s legal reputation is well deserved, pursuing the patent lawsuit against Pocketpair is not without risk. The lawsuit gives Pocketpair the opportunity to argue, as many of us have done, that the concepts covered by Nintendo’s patents are so broad that a company cannot reasonably claim them.
If Pocketpair can prove prior art (or other works that already contain what is claimed in the asserted patents), Nintendo’s patents could be declared invalid. “If you’re too broad, then you’ve given them a way to make the patent disappear,” Sigmon said, “because you’ve given them a chance to prove that it already existed.”