Nintendo’s Legal Battle with Palworld: A Deep Dive into Gaming’s Patent Wars and What It Means for the Industry
When Palworld launched in early access on January 19, 2024, few could have predicted the massive cultural phenomenon it would become. The game, developed by Japanese indie studio Pocketpair, sold over 8 million copies in its first six days and reached 25 million players within a month. It topped charts on Steam and Xbox, setting player count records for an indie title. However, this explosive success came with a price: Nintendo’s attention.
The game itself is an open-world survival experience where players explore, craft, and collect creatures called Pals. These Pals can fight, build, work in factories, and even wield guns. The darker, more chaotic twist on creature-collecting gameplay immediately drew comparisons to Pokemon, but with a distinctly different flavor. While some saw this as refreshing innovation, Nintendo saw something else: potential patent infringement.
What makes this lawsuit particularly significant is that Nintendo didn’t pursue the route most people expected. Rather than filing a copyright or trademark lawsuit, Nintendo instead filed a patent suit against Pocketpair. This strategic choice reveals something important about how the company approached the case. Nintendo likely recognized that copyright and trademark arguments might not hold up well given the idea-expression dichotomy in copyright law. Patents, however, offered a different avenue of attack.
The patents Nintendo referenced in its lawsuit cover several different gameplay mechanics. These include features like using a capsule-like object to capture creatures and transitioning from riding creatures or items in an open world setting. On the surface, these seem like reasonable things to patent. However, the gaming industry has a long history with these mechanics, and that history would become central to Pocketpair’s defense strategy.
As the lawsuit progressed, Pocketpair took a two-pronged approach. First, the company began patching out some of the gameplay mechanics that Nintendo claimed were protected by patents. This wasn’t an admission of guilt so much as a practical response to the legal threat. Second, and more importantly, Pocketpair began actively trying to invalidate the patents themselves. The company pointed to numerous examples of prior art in other games and game mods that had used the very mechanics Nintendo had managed to patent.
This is where things get really interesting. Prior art is a fundamental concept in patent law. If someone can demonstrate that an invention already existed before a patent was filed, that patent can be invalidated. Pocketpair’s legal team identified games like Ark, Crafttopia, Nintendo’s own Zelda series, and Final Fantasy 14 as examples of titles that had used similar mechanics before Nintendo patented them. They also pointed to game mods that predated Nintendo’s patent applications. This argument, known as the anticipation or obviousness argument, became a cornerstone of Pocketpair’s defense.
The situation took a significant turn in early November 2025 when the Japan Patent Office rejected a key patent application in Nintendo’s monster capture family. This particular patent sat between two other mechanic patents that Nintendo was actively asserting in the Tokyo District Court. The rejection was based on the office’s determination that the patent lacked originality, particularly given the prior art that had been submitted, including games like Ark.
This rejection raises fundamental questions about what should and shouldn’t be patentable in the video game industry. The mechanics in question, such as commanding subjects to automatically attack things, are relatively abstract concepts. One argument against the patent’s validity pointed out that this mechanic sounds similar to ordinary military hierarchies. If you can’t patent the basic concept of commanding units to attack, how can you patent it in a video game context? This gets at the heart of subject matter eligibility, which is a legal principle stating that you can patent something very specific and unique, but you can’t patent really abstract ideas.
The broader context of this lawsuit reveals something troubling about intellectual property disputes in the gaming industry. Some observers have noted that these disputes sometimes look like the pot calling the kettle black. For instance, when Palworld was first released, many gamers noted similarities to Pokemon, but they also recognized that creature-collecting games have existed in various forms for decades. The question becomes: at what point does a game mechanic become so fundamental to a genre that no single company should be able to claim exclusive rights to it?
There’s another layer to this story that emerged in late 2025. Leaks of upcoming Nintendo titles revealed that the company itself was planning to implement many of the innovations that had contributed to Palworld’s blockbuster success. This raised eyebrows in the gaming community. If Nintendo was planning to use similar mechanics in its own future Pokemon games, what was the real motivation behind the patent lawsuit against Pocketpair? Was this genuinely about protecting intellectual property, or was it something else entirely?
Some observers in the gaming press began to question whether the primary objective of the patent enforcement action was actually legal in nature. The theory emerged that Nintendo might be using the lawsuit as a public relations strategy. By alleging intellectual property infringement on Pocketpair’s part, Nintendo could potentially create a narrative that positioned the company as the defender of original game design. Meanwhile, the company could work on its own games that incorporated similar mechanics, potentially creating what some called a reality distortion field around the issue.
This raises a critical question for the entire gaming industry: what does originality really mean in game design? Video games, like all art forms, build on what came before. Game designers study previous titles, learn from them, and incorporate successful mechanics into their own work. This is how the industry evolves. But there’s a difference between being inspired by previous work and directly copying it. The challenge lies in determining where that line is.
The patent system itself may not be well-suited to handle this kind of dispute in the gaming industry. Patents are designed to protect specific technical innovations. They work reasonably well for things like manufacturing processes or chemical formulas. But video game mechanics exist in a gray area. Is a game mechanic a technical innovation worthy of patent protection, or is it more like a literary device or artistic technique that shouldn’t be monopolized by any single company?
Pocketpair’s defense strategy highlighted this tension perfectly. By pointing to games like Ark and Crafttopia that had used similar mechanics years before Nintendo filed its patents, the company was essentially arguing that these mechanics are part of the common vocabulary of game design. They’re tools that multiple developers should be able to use. Nintendo’s counter-argument was that the specific implementation of these mechanics in Palworld was too similar to Pokemon’s approach.
The rejection of Nintendo’s patent application by the Japan Patent Office suggests that at least some legal authorities are sympathetic to this broader argument. If a patent is too abstract or if the mechanics it covers are too fundamental to a genre, it shouldn’t be granted. This could have significant implications not just for the Palworld case, but for how patents are handled in the gaming
