Here are the patents Nintendo and the Pokémon Company are suing Palworld about, according to Pocketpair
Palworld developers Pocketpair have finally revealed which patents Nintendo and the Pokémon Company are suing them about. It looks like they’re focusing on the act of throwing capsular items to catch or release monsters, together with the usage of monsters as mounts.
If you’ve somehow yet to encounter Palworld, it’s a bestselling survival game that takes hefty – some would say, scandalous – inspiration from Pokémon, with players poaching Pokésque critters using magic spheres, and deploying them as soldiers and minions.
When Palworld hit Steam in January, there was an outcry from some Pokémon players that it had broken Pokémon’s copyright. After an ominous interlude, Nintendo announced legal proceedings against Pocketpair in September, declaring that the corporation would “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.”
Rather than going after Palworld’s monster designs, which definitely look a hell of a lot like certain Pokémon, Nintendo claim Pocketpair have broken their patents on specific game mechanics. They didn’t specify which patents at the time, but Pocketpair have now listed three in a post published today. They also report that Nintendo and the Pokémon Company are seeking an injunction against Palworld, together with late payment damages for the use of their patents.
The formatting of Pocketpair’s post makes the exact amount sought in damages unclear – it could be that Nintendo and the Pokémon Company want five million yen each, or that they want five million yen in total. For clarity, the Pokémon Company isn’t a Nintendo subsidiary but the result of a joint investment by the companies holding the copyright and trademark on Pokémon – Game Freak, Creatures and Nintendo.
“The Plaintiffs claim that “Palworld,” released by us on January 19, 2024, infringes upon the following three patents held by the Plaintiffs, and are seeking an injunction against the game and compensation for a portion of the damages incurred between the date of registration of the patents and the date of filing of this lawsuit,” reads the post.
The patents in question were all applied for and registered this year, after the early access launch of Palworld, though they appear to be based on older “parent” patents. They are: Patent No. 7545191, applied for on 30th July and registered on 27th August; Patent No. 7493117, applied for on 26th February and registered on 22nd May, and Patent No. 7528390, applied for on 5th March and registered on 26th July.
I’ve looked the patent numbers up on the Japan Platform for Patent Information, aka J-PlatPat, which has Japanese-to-English machine translation. Here are their machine-translated overviews. There’s a lot more detail on each patent page, of course, including diagrams, but it should give you a rough indication.
Patent No. 7545191
“Determining, in a first mode, an aiming direction in a virtual space based on a second operation input, and causing, in a second mode, a player character to shoot, in the aiming direction, an item that affects a field character placed on a field in the virtual space based on a third operation input Based on the second operation input, the aiming direction is determined, and based on the third operation input, the player character is caused to shoot the battle character in the aiming direction.”Patent No. 7493117
“A sighting direction within a virtual space is determined based on second operation input in a first mode, a player character is allowed to release an item affecting a field character disposed on a field within a virtual space toward the sighting direction on the basis of third operation input, a sighting direction is determined based on second operation input in a second mode, and the play character is allowed to release a fighting character who fights toward the sighting direction on the basis of the third operation input.”Patent No. 7528390
“In one example of a game program, a riding object for ground or an aerial riding object is selected by a selection operation, and a player character is made to ride on the selected riding object. In the case that the player character riding on the aerial riding object moves toward the ground, a change is automatically made to a state in which the player character rides on the riding object for ground so that the player character can move on the ground.”
Pocketpair aren’t backing down. “We will continue to assert our position in this case through future legal proceedings,” they write in the new post. They also aren’t responding to individual media inquiries, for the moment – we’ll all hear more via their website.
Update: I’ve added a line to clarify that while the patents above appear to have been registered this year, they are based on older patents that pre-date Palworld’s early access launch.