The Nintendo/Palworld Patent Suit Appears To Be Heading For A Muted Conclusion

from the pointless dept

It’s been a while since we checked in on the Nintendo patent suit in Japan against Pocketpair, the company behind the hit game Palworld. If you need a quick refresher, here you go.

Pocketpair made a game that was clearly inspired by the Pokémon series of games, but which also did no direct copying of any of those games. We argued it was a fantastic example of the idea/expression dichotomy in most copyright laws, though we also expected Nintendo to try to do something about it anyway because, well, it’s Nintendo. Nintendo did in fact sue Pocketpair in Japan, but for patent infringement instead of copyright. The patents in question were for generic gaming mechanics that enjoy plenty of examples of prior art. While Pocketpair fought back in the suit, the company also began quickly patching out the content in its game that Nintendo was complaining about in the lawsuit, while also seeking to invalidate Nintendo’s nonsense patents. Nintendo also attempted to file additional patents to use in the suit after filing it, one of which was rejected.

That year and a half journey got us to the present, where there are hearings in Japan set to be held and a court opinion to be issued in November. And nobody seems to think that Nintendo is going to get much out of the suit, if it gets anything at all.

If you need an illustration of what the sunk cost fallacy is, you could do worse than look in the direction of Nintendo’s Japanese copyright infringement lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair, which appears to be heading to its final stages and, in the opinion of legal analysis by Games Fray’s Florian Mueller, a meager result for the Big N.

Mueller reports that in November 2025, Nintendo amended the scope of what it seeks in court to only focus on the older versions of the survival sandbox, as Pocketpair made updates through Palworld’s early access that changed mechanics that were specifically argued as patent infringing, like summoning captured critters from balls and using them for transportation.

The problem for Nintendo here is that the limited scope of the patent infringement suit also limits any potential damages it could be awarded. There are two things working against Nintendo here. First, some of the patents that it is relying on in the suit didn’t exist at the time Palworld was released, so those initial sales of the game won’t figure into the damages according to Mueller’s analysis of Japanese law. Second, so to would damages not apply to later versions of the game when the supposedly infringing material was patched out of the game. That narrows the window of time for which Nintendo could seek damages to a very limited scope. The same applies to the injunction that Nintendo has been seeking, which wouldn’t even apply to the present version of the game.

In Mueller’s estimation, this basically hamstrings any real monetary relief that Nintendo could possibly get. Assuming that it clears all of the legal hurdles needed to win its case, it may result in a settlement of ¥5M, or $30K US at most, which amounts to “chump change” for both parties or “a rounding error” compared to Nintendo’s litigation expenses.

“This litigation is no longer about anything serious in commercial terms,” Mueller concludes. “It’s about a hypothetical injunction that doesn’t apply to current product versions and (if anything) a small damages award for a period during which Pocketpair generated limited new sales in Japan.”

I can’t imagine anything more Nintendo than this. A lawsuit that harasses a competitor that isn’t actually infringing on copyright, over patents that never should have been granted and should in fact be invalidated, for an amount of money that is dwarfed by the cost of time, money, and energy that was spent on the lawsuit in the first place.

And that’s assuming Nintendo wins any part of this and doesn’t instead end up with a handful of nixed patents on its hands for all of its trouble. This suit should have been settled months and months ago, but I suppose Nintendo is going to Nintendo.

Filed Under: japan, palworld, patents, pokemon

Companies: nintendo, pocketpair