Remember back in January when The Pokémon Company said: planned to “investigate” monster taming game Palworld for intellectual property infringement? Well, it looks like Pikachu and his friends are officially filing a lawsuit against the game’s developer.
On September 18, the company and Nintendo released a joint statement on the publisher’s website Announcement of the lawsuit on the grounds that it is seeking damages against Palworld Developer Pocketpair for patent infringement. Shortly after the launch in January 2024 Palworld rose in popularity and at the same time caused a stir because of his monster designs, which seemed almost identical to those in Pokemon.
The full statement from Nintendo and Pokémon is as follows:
Nintendo Co., Ltd. (Headquarters: Kyoto, Minami-ku, Japan; Representative Director and President: Shuntaro Furukawa, hereinafter “Nintendo”), together with The Pokémon Company, filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Pocketpair, Inc. (Headquarters: 2-10-2 Higashigotanda, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo, hereinafter “Defendant”) in the Tokyo District Court on September 18, 2024.
This action seeks an injunction and damages on the grounds that Palworlda game developed and published by the defendant, infringes several patent rights.
Nintendo will continue to take the necessary steps against any infringement of its intellectual property rights, including the Nintendo brand itself, in order to protect the intellectual property it has worked hard to build over the years.
My city has reached out to Pocketpair for comment on the situation and will update this story if we receive a response.
Despite the similarities in design, some players believed that Palworld offered a better experience than many of the recent Pokemon GamesThis followed years of growing dissatisfaction with games like Pokémon Scarlet And Violetwho were plagued with technical problems at startup. The similarities were a hot topic when the game was released, and fans were quick to Mod the game with Pokemon Charactersthat was immediately DMCA’dThis all comes two months after Pocketpair partnered with Sony to Palworld Entertainmenta company committed to expanding the franchise.
Update: 09/18/24, 10:23 PM ET: Nintendo issued the following statement to My city by email:
“We have filed the lawsuit at this time after carefully reviewing the content that is the subject of this lawsuit. We will refrain from commenting on matters related to the content of the lawsuit.”
