While everyone is patiently waiting for news from Nintendo regarding the upcoming successor to the Switch, the company has made another, undoubtedly surprising announcement.
Months later The fading worldNintendo has now filed a patent lawsuit against developer Pocketpair, claiming that Palworld “infringes on multiple patent rights.” Now, we all know that Nintendo can be extremely ruthless when it comes to protecting its intellectual property and, according to a new interview with game analyst Serkan Tot via 404 Mediathe company will almost certainly win.
For starters, Toto notes that Nintendo will take its time to build an absolutely airtight case against Pocketpair, taking into account all potential counter-arguments to ensure victory.
“So, first of all, this lawsuit was brought under Japanese law, so it has nothing to do with the US, it has nothing to do with UK or EU law at all. And the second thing is that I think Nintendo needed time to really build a case, lay out everything, including the counterarguments the other side might make in the lawsuit, and how to counter them and be absolutely sure they think they’ll win before filing suit.”
He then compares this current case with that of Coloplo, a mobile developer known for the game called The White Cat Project. Nintendo has filed a number of copyright complaints date back to 2016, but when those remained unresolved, the company filed a patent lawsuit, eventually winning a $20 million settlement in addition to ongoing licensing fees from Colopl.
A likely scenario, then, is that Nintendo has realized that it can’t successfully sue Pocketpair for copyright infringement (ie the incredibly similar creature designs), and is therefore choosing to focus on potential patent infringements (and for context, Stephen Totilo posted an example of the patent which power to be in conversation; spoilers, involves throwing objects at creatures to catch them). Toto believes that Nintendo is trying to “damage [Pocketpair] financially as they can” and will push for licensing fees instead of shutting down Palworld entirely.
“Nintendo, of course, knows that Pocketpair made probably hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue this year, and also hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. Since Pocketpair is a Japanese team, the salaries are not as high as in the US. It’s a small team. This is not AAA the game is not a very expensive game.
“So I think the profit margin is probably sky high The fading world and I don’t think Nintendo liked that at all and said, look, they’re basically stealing our character designs. There is nothing we can do about this. So let’s screw them with other things, like, again, patents that are very, very technical. No patents have been listed yet, so we don’t know what the patents are. We don’t know what patents Nintendo is actually talking about, but I’ll bet you today that it’s going to be very, very technical stuff.”
However, not everyone agrees. As reported IgreRadarbusiness lawyer Richard Hoeg recently took to social media to express his belief that “Nintendo could reach.” There are a few points to consider here: one is that, as Hoeg himself stated, this is very much a “start-up” reaction, and two, we simply don’t know what patents are involved in the case. As Toto mentioned, they are probably extremely technical patents that outsiders like us are not aware of.
It’s all very interesting stuff and we can’t wait to see how this plays out. However, the case against Coloplo took several years to reach a settlement, so it’s likely – especially given Palworld’s popularity and exposure since its launch – that we’ll be waiting a long time before we see any resolution here. Watch this space.
