‘Cold-Blooded Business’: Nintendo Is Patent Trolling Palworld Because It Got Too Big

Yesterday Nintendo and The Pokémon Company announced that they are suing Pocketpair, the developer of the viral Pokémon-with-guns game, Palworld, for patent infringement in Japan. Pocketpair has since responded, saying that “It is truly unfortunate that we will be forced to allocate significant time to matters unrelated to game development due to this lawsuit,” and at the moment, it is still unaware which patents Nintendo is accusing it of infringing on. 

Over the years, I’ve written plenty of stories about Nintendo going after video games that are clearly inspired by or straight up reusing Nintendo’s intellectual property. These are usually “fan games” that use Nintendo assets or characters in order to remake or create new Zelda games, Mario games, Metroid games, etc. And while these games are often very cool and interesting, it’s not surprising that they shut down once Nintendo sends them a cease and desist. 

What Nintendo is doing to Pocketpair is quite different. Palworld, which I played and liked a lot, has not literally reused existing Nintendo assets or character designs. Instead, Palworld blatantly takes some of the defining ideas and game mechanics from the Pokémon games and uses them to make an entirely new, open world survival game where players can capture and train creatures (and give them machine guns), something the Pokémon games have not done. 

To learn more about what Nintendo is doing and why, I talked to a Japan game industry analyst I’ve followed for years, Serkan Toto, the CEO of Japan game industry consulting firm Kantan Games. Toto told me that he is pretty sure that Nintendo is going to win, even if the patents have little to do with what makes Pokémon games Pokémon games, but that this doesn’t mean Palworld will go away. 

The interview that follows has been edited for clarity and length. 

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