Pocketpair has responded to Nintendo’s legal action by asserting the patents The Pokémon Company believes Pocketpair has contravened are invalid due to other games that came before it, including Ark: Survival Evolved, Tomb Raider, and even Nintendo’s own Legend of Zelda series.
As reported by Games Fray (thanks, VGC), Palworld developer Pocketpair challenged Nintendo’s patent applications which were reportedly filed between February and July 2024, several weeks and months after the monster-collecting game debuted in January of that same year.
Pocketpair maintains through prior preparatory briefs that Nintendo’s patents-in-suit shouldn’t have been granted given games using the systems and art protected by the patents were already in existence.
Specifically, the developer said the patents contravene art already in place in Ark: Survival Evolved, Pocket Souls, and its own Craftopia, as well as a whole list of other notable references, including Final Fantasy 14, Tomb Raider, Far Cry 5, Titanfall 2, Octopath Traveler, Pikmin 3, Monster Hunter Ultimate, and a range of prior Pokémon games.
Pocketpair states that games like Rune Factory 5, Titanfall 2, and Pikmin 3 Deluxe “make it easy to see how a player character can perform an action to release a monster or a capture item (like a ball) and fire in a direction by releasing a button”, whilst Pikmin 3 Deluxe, Far Cry 5 and Tomb Raider “already showed that there can be different types of throwable objects”.
Furthermore, Pocket Souls, Octopath Traveler, Monster Super League and Final Fantasy 14 “made it easy to imagine that one could pick targets on the field and then show an indication of how likely the capture operation is to succeed”, and “generally speaking, it has been an element of the Pokémon series for more than 30 years that different capture items have different success rates”.
If, like Pocketpair believes, all these games already invalidate Nintendo’s patents, “it doesn’t matter whether Palworld does what such a patent describes: you can infringe an invalid patent all you want”.
“There is no question that Pocketpair and its lawyers have made a huge effort to develop many invalidity and non-infringement arguments,” the briefing by Games Fray – prepared by a patent-specialist Japanese lawyer – states.
“Again, a single such argument for a given patent is enough to be cleared with respect to that patent. But Nintendo is suing over three patents, and Pocketpair won’t want to lose over any single one of them.”
As Eurogamer sumarised recently, comparisons were made between Pocketpair’s own monster-catching title and Pokémon ever since Palworld was first revealed. Dubbed “Pokémon with guns” ahead of its early access release last year, The Pokémon Company’s former chief legal officer Don McGowan said he was “surprised” the game had “got this far” before Nintendo finally announced it was suing Pocketpair for infringement of “multiple” patents in September. It was later confirmed the lawsuit was targeting three patents in particular.
As part of an update in December, Pocketpair subsequently removed the ability to summon creatures by throwing Pokéball-style Pal Spheres but despite this, Pocketpair has released a game on Nintendo Switch, and is considering bringing Palworld to Nintendo Switch 2.