Nintendo Files Lawsuit Against Palworld Developer Pocketpair

Nintendo confirmed they’ve filed a lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair, Inc. for infringement of patent rights.

This was revealed in a brief statement found on Nintendo’s official site. The full statement can be found below.

Filing Lawsuit for Infringement of Patent Rights
against Pocketpair, Inc.

Nintendo Co., Ltd. (HQ: Kyoto, Minami-ku, Japan; Representative Director and President: Shuntaro Furukawa, “Nintendo” hereafter), together with The Pokémon Company, filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the Tokyo District Court against Pocketpair, Inc. (HQ: 2-10-2 Higashigotanda, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo, “Defendant” hereafter) on September 18, 2024.

This lawsuit 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.

Nintendo will 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.

This move is both expected, and unexpected from Nintendo. Back in Jan. 2024 Nintendo released a statement saying they would investigate Palworld to see if it infringed on any of Nintendo’s intellectual property rights related to Pokemon. After Palworld craze died down, and roughly 7 months passed many players assumed Nintendo was unable to find anything.

At the time of posting Pocketpair has not released a statement about the lawsuit.

The news also comes at an unfortunate time for Pocketpair, who is expected to announce a PlayStation 5 version of Palworld at the Tokyo Game Show (Sept. 26 to 29). It also comes a couple days after they addressed concerns about Palworld‘s future.

TL;DR – We are not changing our game’s business model, it will remain buy-to-play and not f2p or GaaS.

Recently, an article was published in which we discussed the possible future direction of Palworld and ideas for continuing the game for a long time.

In fact, this interview was conducted several months ago. At that time, we were still considering the best way forward for Palworld to create a long-lasting game that continues to grow. We are still discussing this internally, as it is quite challenging to find the ideal path, but we have already decided that the F2P/GaaS approach is not suitable for us.

Palworld was never designed with that model in mind, and it would require too much work to adapt the game at this point. Additionally, we are very aware that this just isn’t what our players want, and we always put our players first.

We are still considering skins and DLC for Palworld in future as a means to support development, but we will discuss this with you all again as we get closer to that point. For now, our priority remains making Palworld the best game possible.

We apologize for any concern this may have caused, and we hope this clarifies our position.

Thank you for your continued support of Palworld.

Time will tell what, if any, impact this has on Palworld’s future.