Nintendo's Patent Lawsuit Against Palword Dealt A Rare Fatal Blow

Nintendo's ongoing patent lawsuit case against Palworld developers Pocketpair has hit a surprising speedbump, though the battle is far from over. For those unaware, Nintendo is suing Pocketpair for patent infringement in Japanese court, and two of the three patents it is claiming have been violated relate to game mechanics that revolve around capturing monsters and sending them out to fight or capture other monsters for you. While this description does indeed describe many Pokemon games and obviously Palworld, the fact of the matter is that these mechanics have existed for longer than Nintendo has been using them with Pokemon—and especially before the patent was initially filed in 2021. Pocketpair has already defended itself by providing some of these examples, a list including Monster Hunter and Far Cry.

Nintendo's problem here is twofold; not only has the company failed to prove that it actually invented these mechanics (it didn't), but it's also blatantly trying to use them in court decades after the fact in order to go after a competitor. While a judgement has not been made in the full case yet, two of Nintendo's key patent applications being rejected during the case means that Nintendo will either be forced to appeal to the Intellectual Property High Court (IPHC) or abandoning the patent application outright. Knowing Nintendo, this is likely just the beginning of a lengthy appeals process, but that it's already being forced to resort to appeals in its own home turf of Japan could bode well for the future of Pocketpair's Palworld inside and outside of the country. Here in the United States, we've already seen 22 of 23 of Nintendo's anti-Palworld patent filings be rejected.

The case begins to look even muddier for Nintendo when one observes the third patent it's attempting to sue over, which is a patent relating to players being able to smoothly switch between riding objects, i.e. from horseback riding to bird-flying. While this was indeed shown in Palworld, the feature was recently removed from the game, and demo'd about six months prior to Nintendo submitting its original application in 2021, much less the updated patent applications made post-Palworld launch. While no judgements have been made on that patent, Nintendo already modified it in July 2025 during the lawsuit, lending credence to the belief that even The Big N knows that patent claim is dubious at best.

What does all of this mean for Pocketpair and Nintendo? For now, not much—as observed in the GamesFray coverage of this Nintendo patent dispute case, it's unlikely that any kind of conclusion will be reached in this case until next year. But it does present Nintendo's case as very weak, and has fans of the medium worldwide heaving a sigh of relief, knowing that Nintendo can't simply claim to have invented mechanics that were already present in other video games. Even in the case where a mechanic is invented by a given developer, it's also heavily frowned upon for older game development studios to come after new ones for being inspired by and iterating upon those mechanics, since it's unhealthy for the genre and large and stifles innovation.

While Palworld and Pokemon fans continue to play and enjoy their games, Nintendo is busy building up a legal effort to sabotage Palworld and other Pokemon-inspired projects like it—hopefully, a loss or two in the courtroom will deter Nintendo from this behavior and instead get them to actually fund the graphical development of Pokemon games. Unfortunately, Nintendo will probably keep hunting whoever it can in the courtroom regardless of the outcome here—hopefully next time it sticks with a more deserving target than fellow game developers or its own fans, though.

Image Credit: Pocketpair, Nintendo (via a Megazine Scan Uploaded to Bulbapedia)