Nintendo and The Pokemon Company have filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair, and while there's no public confirmation of the specifics of the suit just yet, it's looking likely that a 2021 Pokeball patent could be at the heart of it. And judging by the results of the most famous patent on a video game mechanic, this one could change monster-collecting RPGs for decades.
While Palworld initially came under close scrutiny due to the similarities its creature designs shared with various Pokemon, it seems Nintendo has given up that line of attack with this patent lawsuit. If Nintendo were concerned about what Pals look like, this would likely be a copyright lawsuit. A patent lawsuit suggests that Nintendo's got exclusive rights on some game mechanic that appears in Palworld, but the publisher hasn't been specific about what those patents entail.
The patent appears to specifically be about throwing an item in a "virtual space" ala modern titles like Pokemon Legends: Arceus (or, again, Palworld), distinct from using that item in a turn-based battle as in the old Pokemon games. That might explain why Nintendo filed that patent in December 2021, about a month before the launch of Legends: Arceus, rather than in the preceding decades.
The patent application was ultimately granted to Nintendo in Japan in December 2023 which was, notably, one month before the launch of Palworld. The patent's status is still pending in the US, but its Japanese status is likely more important, given that Pocketpair itself is a Japanese studio.
Reiterating, because I realize this has been confusing...Nintendo and The Pokemon applied for this patent in 2021 and secured it in Japan in 2023. The application is still pending in the U.S.@sweetpotatoes has a good story on this: https://t.co/BsVBqtdhMV https://t.co/ZIhquVwfYTSeptember 20, 2024
Nintendo has, again, not confirmed whether this Pokeball patent is part of the lawsuit, and it has claimed multiple patents were infringed, but it's tough to imagine a world where it's not part of the court proceedings. If Nintendo is successfully able to defend its exclusive rights to this game mechanic, history shows this could have a major effect on other games in the future.
The most famous example of a game mechanic patent is Namco's 1995 patent on minigames during loading screens. In the early days of the PS1, when the nascent CD medium was introducing console gamers to the horrors of extended loading times, Namco started including shrunken versions of its arcade classics to help players pass the time while waiting for their then-modern games to load.
Namco's idea was clever, but the company's patent meant that no other developer could do a loading screen minigame until the patent expired in 2015. Some skirted the issue with playable training and warm-up areas to fill in loading times, but few studios were willing to directly test how seriously Namco was willing to defend that patent.
Another, more recent example comes in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor's patented Nemesis system - a memorable feature that seemed like an obvious thing for other games to pull inspiration from. Yet that patent has meant no major studio has even tried. No matter the outcome of this Palworld lawsuit, it's easy to see a world where any future takes on the creature-collecting RPG might have to be very careful about how they let you capture those monsters.
Nintendo, certainly, is not a company that's afraid to defend its legal rights, and its own patents have already changed the course of the game industry in other ways. "This is why Xbox had Kinect and Sony's gesture controller uses a camera; because Nintendo had a really strong set of patents around controllers moving in space," former Pokemon Company lawyer Don McGowan tells Game File. "Nintendo is a company that understands the value of having their games feel like they're integrated with their console, because at their heart they're a consumer electronics company. They exist to sell you things. So its games are designed to take advantage of the features of its things. Is this good? Well, it's good for Nintendo."
