It would be hard to blame Nintendo for becoming used to getting its way when it comes to courts. In case after case, the Japanese behemoth crushes its prey, scoring millions in damages. But when it comes to the increasingly complex attempt to take down the enormous success of creature-collecting survival game Palworld, Nintendo has just taken a big blow, being denied a vital patent.
In one of the more peculiar twists of the lengthy battle between Pokémon owners Nintendo and Palworld creators Pocketpair, Nintendo submitted a few new or revised patents to the courts to attempt to retrospectively claim rights to specific gaming mechanics. While some might very sensibly consider the idea of a gaming mechanic being something someone could patent as anathema to all of art and creativity, and to be rank hypocrisy in an industry that’s entirely built on top of mechanics created by previous generations, it’s still somehow a thing. And a thing Nintendo was rather heavily relying on in its court case against Palworld.
When Palworld first appeared in January 2024, pretty much everyone’s reaction was to laugh at the absolutely blatant copies of very familiar Pokémon that appeared in the game. It seems Nintendo wanted to take action, but suing over pastiches of their characters is a tricky business, so eight months later the company instead opted for going after Palworld‘s creature-capturing mechanics—throwing an orb that then captures the animal—that are most familiar from Pokémon games.
And it only got weirder. When we finally got the details of the lawsuit in November of last year, it became apparent that Nintendo and The Pokémon Company were suing for less than $70,000, and the basis for its case were all patents the company had filed in that year, after Palworld had been released. Three patents were cited, the first based on throwing a Poké Ball to start combat, the second a tweak of an older patent to update it to capturing Pokémon in the wild, and the third the most extraordinary, a claim to rights for a simple transition onto rideable creatures in open worlds.
Who hunts the monster hunters?
Jump to today, and it seems this tactic isn’t entirely panning out. Games Fray noticed that the Japanese Patent Office has suggested two of these three patents are pretty dubious. The issue, it seems, is Nintendo’s attempt to update its former patents to include the more open-world elements of Pokémon games since 2022, despite the wealth of prior examples of such mechanics appearing far earlier in other open-world titles. According to Games Fray, the patent office cited examples like Monster Hunter 4, ARK, and even Pocketpair’s own Craftopia. Oh, and to really stick it home, Pokémon GO.
Now Nintendo has to decide between abandoning this specific route in the increasingly ridiculous legal action (never forget that while Palworld was absolutely mimicking Pokémon designs, it just simply isn’t a similar type of game, instead focused on survival and crafting), or petitioning the patent office to accept its case.
It’s just…the case is gross. Developers shouldn’t be able to patent mechanics, and had it ever been a common part of games design, we simply wouldn’t have video games. Everything you play is built on the shoulders of what came before. Donkey Kong may have an argument to be the first ever platform game, but it doesn’t exist without Crazy Climber and Space Panic. Pocketpair deliberately provoked Nintendo, and Nintendo foolishly fell for it, and the result is years of expensive litigation for no meaningful results.
